
For example, you can’t create a calculated field or calculated item. If the command is active, your pivot table is OLAP-basedĪnd if you check the Fields, Items, & Sets drop down, some of the features will be dimmed out, for OLAP-based pivot tables.If it’s dimmed out, your pivot table is the traditional type.In the Calculations section, find the OLAP Tools command.On the Excel Ribbon, click the Analyze tab (under PivotTable Tools).When the source data is added to the data model, you end up with an OLAP-based Power Pivot, instead of a traditional pivot table, and the grouping feature is not available.Ī quick way to tell if your pivot table is OLAP-based is to check the Ribbon: If you checked that box, you won’t be able to group any items in the pivot table.


We’ll look at the traditional reasons for this grouping problem in the next section. The message doesn’t give you any clues as to why you can’t group the items. Here’s a screen shot of the “Cannot group that selection.” error message that appears. For Excel 2013 and later, there’s another thing that can prevent you from grouping - the Excel Data Model. If you try to group pivot table items in Excel, you might get an error message that says, “Cannot group that selection.” For older versions of Excel, if you had a problem grouping pivot table items, it was usually caused by blank cells, or text in number/date fields.
