Browser-based Pivot Tables

There are some interesting ways to present a pivot table in a browser. Some of the Javascript based tools can actually work with very large data sets:

Here we have a data set with 1.2 million records, and it is actually quite workable using the JavaScript code from here. In this example we used the heatmap to show production of green coffee and we see immediately Brazil is the largest producer. This tool is a useful alternative for the GAMS/IDE GDX viewer which has a very fast pivot table facility but is somewhat barebones, and for Excels pivot table which is highly configurable but needs external data for large data sets (and needs Excel to be installed).

The data for the above table was exported from a GAMS data set, and included in the HTML page as a JSON-type data set. The advantage of a browser based solution is that you can disseminate results easily over the Web and users do not have to install any software.