Extracting “hidden” data from expanding/collapsing pivot table - Excel

Question

I'm not sure if this is possible but as you can see I have a pivot table with multiple dependent and expandable fields. I am trying to concatenate the data from columns A:D into one cell which works fine in row 2 but doesn't work with blank parent cells, as you can see in column F.

Any ideas for how to achieve this?

Pivot table

Answer 1

This answer assumes that you don't want to just Repeat All Item Labels in the PivotTable from the "Report Layout" drop-down on the Pivt Table Tools "Design" tab.

A formula to get the first non-blank value on or above the same row as the current cell from Column B can be constructed with a combination of AGGREGATE , SUMPRODUCT and OFFSET , like so:

=OFFSET($B2,SUMPRODUCT(AGGREGATE(14,6,ROW($B$1:$B$100)*--(ROW($B$1:$B$100)<=ROW())*--(LEN($B$1:$B$100)>0),1))-ROW(),0)

How does it work?

Starting with the outermost part, OFFSET($B2, VALUE, 0) - this will start in cell B2 , then look up or down by VALUE rows to get the value.

Next we need to know how many rows we will need to look up-or-down. Now, if we can work out the bottom-most row with data, we can subtract the current ROW() from that, giving us OFFSET($B2, NON_BLANK-ROW(),0)

So, to finish up we need to work out which rows are not blank, AND which rows are on-or-above our current row, then take the largest of those. This is going to take an ArrayFormula, but we can use SUMPRODUCT to make that calculate properly. To find the largest number we could use MAX or LARGE - but we get less errors if we pick AGGREGATE(14,6,..,1) . (The 14 means "we want the k th largest number", the 6 means "ignore error values", and the 1 is k - so "we want the largest number, ignoring errors")

But, what list of numbers are we going to look at, I don't hear you ask. Well, we want the ROW for output from our range (I'm using $B$1:$B$100 , because using the whole column B would take far to long to calculate repeatedly), a comparison against the current ROW() , and check that the LEN gth is > 0. Those last two are comparisons, so let's write them out first:

ROW($B$1:$B100)<=ROW() 

and

LEN($B$1:$B$100)>0

We want to use -- to convert TRUE and FALSE to 1 and 0 - this means that any "bad" values become 0, and any "good" values are larger than 0:

ROW($B$1:$B$100)*--(ROW($B$1:$B$100)<=ROW())*--(LEN($B$1:$B$100)>0)

This gives us the Row number when the Row is on-or-before the current row AND Column B is not blank - if either of those are False, then we get 0 instead. Stick that in the AGGREGATE to find the largest number:

AGGREGATE(14, 6, ROW($B$1:$B$100)*--(ROW($B$1:$B$100)<=ROW())*--(LEN($B$1:$B$100)>0), 1)

Then put it in a SUMPRODUCT to force Excel to treat it as an ArrayFormula, and that's your NON_BLANK . This then gives you that first formula right at the top of the post