# Excel Question - Pivot Tables Sorting

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/excel-question-pivot-tables-sorting/653920>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [March 25, 2013, 3:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/excel-question-pivot-tables-sorting/653920 "2013-03-25T15:06:58Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Time\_Stranger](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/5fc32e/32.png) [@Time\_Stranger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Time_Stranger)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2013, 3:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/excel-question-pivot-tables-sorting/653920/1 "2013-03-25T15:06:58Z")

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I have (what I hope) is a simple excel question. FTR, I’ve never worked with PivotTables before today.

I have a spreadsheet with thousands of rows with two columns: “Majors” and “Job Titles.”

I’ve sorted them by major and then alphabetically by job title, and then I made a Pivottable with this information. (So far, so good.)

So in the pivotTable, when I click “Majors,” a column of all Job Titles is displayed alphabetically. It removed duplicates and blanks (good). But I would like it to sort by how often a title occurred in the column per major, not alphabetically. Is this possible?

Even better, additionally I would like to generate a report/table that says how many times each title appears in each major, and to disregard any job title that appears less than a certain number of times. But I have no idea on how to go about this, or what to search for in help. Any ideas?

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Time\_Stranger](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/5fc32e/32.png) [@Time\_Stranger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Time_Stranger)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2013, 3:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/excel-question-pivot-tables-sorting/653920/2 "2013-03-25T15:40:49Z")

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Sorry, never mind, I figured it out.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Saintly\_Loser](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/saintly_loser/32/4045_2.png) [@Saintly\_Loser](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saintly_Loser)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2013, 7:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/excel-question-pivot-tables-sorting/653920/3 "2013-03-25T19:24:01Z")

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COUNTIF function? Not in a pivot table, but it can give you a count of instances.