big counting problem

[Guest]

Hello,

I’m using a pivot table that queries a pretty big database table (around
150000 records).
Each record represents invoice line item. There are several occurrences of
each invoice number. Here’s an example of the source data:
Invoice # Accounting Period Other field
1 200401
1 200401
1 200401
2 200401

I need to know the number of invoices per period. What I ended up doing was
putting invoice number field into row area of a pivot table so I would have
only unique numbers and just selecting the whole column and using the count
function on a status bar. I have to manually record the number of invoices,
change accounting period in the pivot table and repeat the process. That’s a
lot of manual operations.

Maybe there is a programmatic way to solve this.

 

[Ken Wright]

I may have misread that, but why can't you just drag the Invoice number into
the DATA field and have it COUNT the items. Should list a count of them per
period if you have Period in the Row fields.