Creating a pivot table in Microsoft Excel when using a screen reader is a challenging task since you need to select the fields that will be included in the table. Please see the following extract of a post made on the AccessIndia mailing list by syed imran on creating pivot tables in Microsoft Excel 2007. Thanks syed for allowing me to post them on my blog.
Yes it is accessible (without a sample excel file it’s hard to
explain, but I’ll try).
For example There’s a worksheet that contains a detailed study of your
client base such as their demographics, their income level, product
preference, buying pattern etc and let’s say this whole data runs over
some 4000 rows, but you’re only interested in finding out just the
average income level of your clients by region.
This is one of the reasons why you may want to use the pivot table
feature.
To creat a pivot table:
- go to the top left cornor of the data (for example, A1)
- Go to insert pivot table or pivot chart pivot table (Alt n, v, enter)
- confirm the selection (something like $A$1:$S$4000) and press enter
- By default the pivot table gets created in a new worksheet and the
cursor lands in A3. Press F6 to move to the field list box where you
can select what needs to be put in rows, what needs to be put in
columns, and what needs to go as value.
for example, select “region” as row then “income Level” as value. - Press shift f6 to go back to the newly designed pivot table, then
verify that the values in the table are summarised correctly ( sum /
count / average) - if you wish to summarise the value in a different manner, then go
to the first cell of the value and then activate the context menu and
then select the appropriate option in the “summarise by” details menu.
This is good stuff!