EXCEL HELP (no VBA) - Dynamic ranges and offset/vlookup - excel

Question

I am pretty new to excel and finding it a little tricky so any help would be appreciated!
I have a master sheet where data is going to be input by people. From this master sheet I have used IF statements to copy relevant columns to another sheet in the workbook. (not sure if thats the best way).
So when a new data row is input into the master sheet, this creates a new row in the other sheet because its displaying what has been input in the master. This is building up a sub-table so to speak. From this sub data (whether turned to a table or not) I want to create pivot tables.
Issues:
If the sub data is turned into a table, when new data is input in the master sheet the sub-table does not expand.
Trying it another way, without creating a table with the sub data I tried to create a dynamic range using OFFSET. However when an entry is deleted from the master sheet this creates a blank row in the dynamic range that is being used to create the pivot table.
Any help would be much appreciated! I've looked into OFFSET, MATCH, VLOOKUP and it's a little confusing although I do get the gist of what these functions can achieve.
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

This particular combo is used to fiddle around with ranges, for example validations and complex lookups.
They will not help you with your issue.
The range expansion is triggered when new data is entered into an adjacent cell, not when its existing condition becomes recognizable.
The =OFFSET() is used to fiddle around with ranges.
The MATCH(...,0) finds the first match of your string, in your case the lack of string.
If you could in fact set up a Pivot table to indirect references this formula would be your solution:
=OFFSET(YourSheet!$A$1,0,0,MATCH("",YourSheet!$A:$A,0)-1,MATCH("",YourSheet!$1:$1,0)-1)
where A1 of YourSheet contains somthing like
=IF(IncrementalDataSheet!A1<>"",IncrementalDataSheet!A1,"")

Answer 2

I think I understand the problem you're having. If you have data in A:Z in Sheet1 and you only want to see columns A, T, and Y for example on your more visually appealing Sheet2, then the initial thought would be to put =Sheet1!A1 into A1 on Sheet2, =Sheet1!T1 into B1, and =Sheet1!Y1 into C1. Copy the range down as far as needed to display the data from Sheet1 and Bingo! A nice tidy summarized version.
But wait... If you delete a row from Sheet1, the referenced cell in Sheet2 now just displays #REF!... boo... that's no good.
So, instead of using direct cell references, you can make use of the INDIRECT function to make sure the values produced are always relative based on the address of the target cell.
In Sheet2 you would put:
A1 =INDIRECT("Sheet1!"&(CELL("address",A1)))
B1 =INDIRECT("Sheet1!"&(CELL("address",T1)))
C1 =INDIRECT("Sheet1!"&(CELL("address",Y1)))
And copy down. At first glance it looks just like the original result, the difference is you can now delete rows from Sheet1 without hurting the output on Sheet2 because the indirect references will just look up new values from where everything shifted.
You should then be able to pivot off of the result dataset pretty easily.
That said... when you make a pivot table you pick which columns you include, so you could just pivot off of the original giant table and exclude any columns that you're not interested in summarizing.