Im hoping this can be a simple answer, but as my searches have ended in me asking a question here, i'm not excited about the potential.

So I have several hundred charts which are set up to gather data from an ODBC data sourcec for the purpose of displaying equipment downtime.  and my issue is that the charts disregard any of the label fields when there is no data in the values field from the data source.  Okay so the show items with no data field I can check to bring back everything from my 10,000+ rows of data in one SQL extraction, because excel now ignores all of the filters that I have placed on the pivot table, what, why does this happen???  - Riddle me this, WHY did the programmers after several years of this not implement a solution to this recurring issue?  I do not accept that we can work around the problem by creating dummy records, as that is simply impractical here and would be extremely intensive on several thousand different pieces of equipment.  So, I have come up with a solution to extrapolate the data utilizing VBA scripting based on building designation and a vlookup identifying the pertinent equipment and down selecting into another data table for the purpose of reporting all of these pieces of equipment utilizing the show items with no data yet again, keep in mind that the amount of data from the source table is too much for power pivot to even begin to try to work with. 

Please understand that each one of these steps create a substantial amount of development time and potential data accuracy gap in the communication process.  Then there is the added benefit of show items with no data on each one of the row fields which is set up as "Equipment classification" (database description field) a group, "equipment number" (unique identifier in table identifying equipment).  When i have several equipment numbers associated with an equipment classification and there is further no data associated with that value i still want to display the piece of equipment to show that we did actually have equipment available during the period where one was down for purpose of production schedule alternative assets.  Now, when i have show items with no data the filter field is once again ignored and thus the equipment identifier (unique id) is now associated in every grouping (equipment classification) and thus totally voids the original purpose for trying to separate out the data, but in a new way now.  So, does anyone have an alternative solution?"

Thank you for your time and consideration.