We recently received a request concerning the media counts as they apply to various descriptor groups or sets within a project. We are always looking to improve our application, and this request made us immediately realize that this would be a useful feature and have put it on the road map. Like all things software development however, it will take some time to incorporate a method of getting these values in Dedoose, in the interim we’ve come up with a way of taking out two birds with one stone. First, using an export of the media into Excel we can create a pivot table that will give you this information. The second bird, introducing you to pivot tables!

Much like our article on iterative filtering, the key is figuring out what your question is, but first…what are pivot tables?

When it comes to summarizing a large amount of data, pivot tables aren’t just good at their job; they Excel. A pivot table is a table that summarizes a larger table. It really is that simple, the difficulty usually comes in acquiring the data set and defining what you want to summarize or analyze. Luckily for you, the first is automatically done by the media export we will be doing momentarily…woohoo!

The first step is easy, we’ll want an export of our media list to Excel. The steps to acquire this file are as follows.

1. Click the Media tab
2. Click Select All
3. Click Export Media (top right)

Once we have this file we are going to make a few quick changes and create a new column, the steps below will get us the file in the format we desire.

1. Click on a populated cell
2. Hit Control and A (Command A on a Mac)
3. Hit Control and T (Command T on a Mac)
4. Confirm through, ensuring the "My data has headers" option is checked
5. Add a new column titled "Media Count"
6. Add a 1 in each cell, this can be automated. It should look like this:

1. From there, click Insert at the top of the page
2. Click Pivot Table
3. Make sure your table is selected
4. Click Ok

Now that we’ve made these adjustments, we can proceed to getting our pivot table, one more round of steps. 1. Go to the PivotTable fields section on the right 2. Ensure Media Count and the two fields you are interested in are checked 3. Drag one of the fields to the Columns section and the other to the Rows section 4. Ensure Media Count is under Values, see the image below:

Our final product will display the media counts distributed across the selected fields and should look fairly similar to this:

That's about it! Luckily, this question is pretty straightforward. As you become more familiar with pivot tables you'll be able to answer more complex questions. With that said, anytime you are curious about getting a specific analysis out of Dedoose please let us know over here at support. We’ll either help you find it within the application or do what we can to use the exports to manifest the desired values in an accommodating format. Questions like these are just one more way we find features to add to our application, and we are always happy to help find solutions to specific challenges.

That about does it for this blog, thanks for taking the time to read it. We’d love to know what you think, comments, suggestions and questions can all be sent to support@dedoose.com and our friendly support staff will do everything they can to help. After all, we do build this application for you and anything you’d like to make us aware of or any features you think our application would benefit from are all things we’d love to hear about.