Pivot table on string

Hi Tiago,

I’m not sure what you mean by saying that you use a string in an Excel Pivot. When you pick a string as the value, the only thing it can do is count them. And that you can also do with our Pivot. A pivot is primarily a summarization tool. 

We have added the concept of editing, when this summary has just 1 row as its source, but that does not mean that it would be easy to substitute that for an actual string, because all the queries and requests that fetch the values expect some kind of summary/aggregation, and thus a numeric value.

It would have to be some kind of ‘special’ control that would count the unique strings, thus be a numeric value, but know how to fetch and display the string and allow that to be edited instead of a numeric value. And it would probably be nice if it still performed. 

I don’t think this is impossible, because the domain with elements does something similar, although there the amount of possible strings is limited to the elements, but it would require a lot of changes. Also, to the SF, because the pivot component would need to know when you want to do this. 

Not impossible, but also not trivial.

"The ideal situation would be to have the suppliers on one axis and the subject on the other
the specific text of each subject / supplier would be visible in a cell."

=> I was asking to have the actual text visible, not the count. 

Maybe I'm mistaking of this being possible in Excel. I believe it is possible with powerBI. Let me see if I can make an example. 

But maybe think about the question behind the question: 

Views and stables are rigid in amount of columns. Sometimes you want to pivot information, also text, which with text is not possible at the moment.

The link of using the the cube to pivot is of course quite easily made, but maybe there are alternatives. 

Hey Tiago,

An example would be great to add for understanding your idea better. Looking forward to it!

I’m sorry if I left the impression that I didn't understand why you would want this. My brain was already trying to solve this technically;

Given this example, can you confirm/deny that this expresses the idea?

We have a course with students and for every week we would like to express a free text progress description.

That would give us data like;

Whenever you add a student or a week, the table will grow. And it is not grouped very intuitively. With you’re suggestion (however we would choose to solve it), you could define this UI.

This focuses you more on providing the remark per student.

Is this a correct representation of what you are asking?

Hi ​@Sebastiaan Meijerink,

That is exactly what I mean. 

In my example it would be like this ​@Mark Jongeling :

I've read somewhere that in western culture, people are used to focused from in a Z direction: Left top top right top, to left bottom to right bottom. 
That is whywe find it easier to do comparisons from left to right in stead of from top to bottom. In terms of UX this would be quite beneficial. 

In tecnical terms it would make it possible to be flexible in terms of creating "tables” with dynamic amount of columns. 

This could be a very useful addition. We could really use it to compare product specifications, for example.