feature request: pivot tables?

[cchance27]

Feature Request

Any chance that you plan to add the ability to do pivot tables on a range of cells?

[jmcnamara]

I've had a look at this in the past (a couple of times) and unfortunately it is too large and complicated to tackle. Some of the issues are:

• The internal plumbing is quite large and replicates a lot of the data for the target dataset in a number of files. That isn't a deal breaker but Excel does a lot of magic in the UI that hides a lot of complexity in the background.
• The API would be large (again not really a deal breaker and could be done over time but if you look at the UI in Excel and think about how it could be mapped to a code API you will get a sense of the scale)
• The main deal breaker is that Excel file format doesn't automatically generate the pivot so it would need to be provided by the user or calculated by the library. Neither of which is trivial. The filtered/pivoted rows also need to be hidden manually/programmatically. That requires replicating the logic of the pivot in the code. (I implemented something similar for autofilters but it would be much harder for pivots).
• Also, since it hasn't already been implemented in the Python library I don't have the test suite that helps accelerate and validate the new Rust code.

So overall this is a can't/won't fix (more can't than won't since Pivots are a killer feature for Excel).