I use pivots extensively in Excel/LibreOffice/Google sheets and find that the lack of a native solution in Grist hampers my adoption across a number of projects.
The community widget using pivottable.js created by jperon is ‘okay’ but suffers from the limitations of the underlying library (sub-totals being the biggest issue imho) plus the styling kinda jars.
Is there any movement towards getting a native pivot table widget?
Happy to talk directly and/or help in development and testing if something is in the works.
Martyn
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Hi @Martyn_Shiner,
I’m not an expert pivot table user, so forgive my naïveté. Is there something that pivot tables can do that Summary Tables can’t?
In my experience, the only difference is the formatting, with all records as rows in Summary Tables, rather than having some breakdown categories as columns as in pivot tables.
They allow you to do narrow->wide analysis, category sub-totals and allow you to change the columns rows and filters at will.
Like this
Unless I’m mistaken summary tables couldn’t produce the final analysis as shown in this blog post.
I admit there could be some work on the aesthetics of the community widget. Plus some minor quirks here and there. It’s open source isn´t it? I guess we could just improve it on a fork?
The Javascript library that the widget is based on has been around for a long time and hasn’t changed much in that period.
There are other issues besides the look and feel with the library… sub-totalling on category being the most obvious.
IMHO, if Grist really does want to be a viable Excel replacement then having native pivot table functionality really needs to be addressed as a high priority.