Somewhat recently, I regularly had to generate Pivot tables and corresponding charts from datasets provided as both CSV and Microsoft Excel files. Now, with its data source and pivot table tools Microsoft Excel usually lends itself to that sort of task.
However, to completely automate this task VBA macros are required. Those too work quite nicely if one overcomes the initial aversion of working with Microsoft’s not exactly well-designed and usable IDE for VBA macros (Excel’s own macro recording feature is quite helpful here, though).
Still, VBA macro code resides within an XLS / XLSX file itself and hence can’t be easily shared between projects, not to mention the maintenance nightmare of not being able to easily commit the code to a version control system.
Hence, I created PivotHelper to help me with that recurring task. PivotHelper is a utility web app that automatically generates Pivot tables and Pivot charts from CSV or XLS / XLSX files.
PivotHelper has been built with these tools and frameworks:
It adheres to the UNIX philosophy in that it is designed to both do one thing well and to provide its output for use as input in other applications.