That way, you get to put your raw data into meaningful insights in a single table — and this brings many benefits. Some of them are:. Users usually opt for pivot tables in situations where they need to aggregate and slice and dice data for analysis. Within Kohezion, we see our customers commonly use pivot tables to do the following:.
You can think of pivot tables as reports. However, unlike a static report, a pivot table provides an interactive view of your data. With minimal effort and no formulas , you can look at the same data from many different perspectives. You can group data into categories, break it down into years and months, and even build charts. Furthermore, if you need to include or exclude specific categories, you can do so easily by applying the desired filter.
This can be a convenient feature. For example, you can get a count by the department from your list of employees. A snappy, efficient pivot table is worth its weight in gold. Getting there is, however, half the battle for many non-technical Excel users. The key is to not make a single report out of all the information you have.
Utilize function tables and pivot tables to summarize and filter data sets that each tells different stories. As one of the essential data analysis tools, pivot tables can quickly answer many critical business questions. As already said, spreadsheets are one solution to create pivot tables. A drag and drop option to move your fields around is the easiest way to go. However, before making the final decision, you should browse through other database examples. Intimidating because you're not exactly an Excel expert, and pivot tables have always had a reputation for being complicated.
The good news: Learning how to create a pivot table in Excel is much easier than you might've been led to believe. But before we walk you through process of creating one, let's take a step back and make sure you understand exactly what a pivot table is, and why you might need to use one.
A pivot table is a summary of your data, packaged in a chart that lets you report on and explore trends based on your information. Pivot tables are particularly useful if you have long rows or columns that hold values you need to track the sums of and easily compare to one another. In other words, pivot tables extract meaning from that seemingly endless jumble of numbers on your screen. And more specifically, it lets you group your data together in different ways so you can draw helpful conclusions more easily.
The "pivot" part of a pivot table stems from the fact that you can rotate or pivot the data in the table in order to view it from a different perspective. To be clear, you're not adding to, subtracting from, or otherwise changing your data when you make a pivot. Instead, you're simply reorganizing the data so you can reveal useful information from it. If you're still feeling a bit confused about what pivot tables actually do, don't worry.
This is one of those technologies that's much easier to understand once you've seen it in action. Here are seven hypothetical scenarios where you'd want to use a pivot table.
Say you have a worksheet that contains monthly sales data for three different products -- product 1, product 2, and product 3 -- and you want to figure out which of the three has been bringing in the most bucks. You could, of course, look through the worksheet and manually add the corresponding sales figure to a running total every time product 1 appears. You could then do the same for product 2, and product 3, until you have totals for all of them. Piece of cake, right?
Now, imagine that monthly sales worksheet of yours has thousands and thousands of rows. Manually sorting through them all could take a lifetime. Using a pivot table, you can automatically aggregate all of the sales figures for product 1, product 2, and product 3 -- and calculate their respective sums -- in less than a minute.
Pivot tables naturally show the totals of each row or column when you create it. But that's not the only figure you can automatically produce. Let's say you entered quarterly sales numbers for three separate products into an Excel sheet and turned this data into a pivot table.
The table would automatically give you three totals at the bottom of each column -- having added up each product's quarterly sales. But what if you wanted to find the percentage these product sales contributed of all company sales, rather than just those products' sales totals?
With a pivot table, you can configure each column to give you the column's percentage of all three column totals, instead of just the column total. In this scenario, you've just completed a blog redesign and had to update a bunch of URLs. Unfortunately, your blog reporting software didn't handle it very well, and ended up splitting the "view" metrics for single posts between two different URLs.
So in your spreadsheet, you have two separate instances of each individual blog post. In order to get accurate data, you need to combine the view totals for each of these duplicates. That's where the pivot table comes into play. Change how items and labels without data are shown. Display or hide blank rows Change the format by doing the following: Manually and conditionally format cells and ranges. Change the overall PivotTable format style.
Change the number format for fields. Here's a PivotChart based on the PivotTable example above. Using an external data source to create a PivotTable or PivotChart. Need more help? Expand your skills. Get new features first. Was this information helpful? Yes No. Thank you! Any more feedback? The more you tell us the more we can help. Can you help us improve? Resolved my issue. Clear instructions. Easy to follow. No jargon. Pictures helped. Didn't match my screen. Incorrect instructions. Too technical.
Not enough information. Not enough pictures. Any additional feedback? Submit feedback. Thank you for your feedback! Household expense data. Because pivot tables summarize data, they can be used to find unique values in a table column. This is a good way to quickly see all the values that appear in a field and also find typos, and other inconsistencies. In a few easy steps, we will see how pivot tables work. Then, no pivot table creating will seem hard anymore.
What information can we get out of this table? We can count the cards in each of the categories for example. Instead of counting all the cards in a specific table cell, the computer can do the counting for us. As a result, we only see the number.
Row Labels in a column? Yes, because every row needs its label at the beginning. This renders the labels to be one below another, hence form a column. Not much has changed, right? It provides us the same information. It is just up to our preference which form we like more.
One difference is that we no longer have Row Labels. Instead, we have Column Labels. Column Labels still refer to the colors red and black.
It is just the fact that they now label each of the columns. As with Row labels , Column Labels are placed at the beginning of the columns and they happen to be one next to each other — thus forming a row. For an easy understanding, you can have a look at the Pivot Table areas diagram at Excel Campus.
So we can sort into groups according to the symbol. What if we wanted to divide the cards into more categories using more of their properties i. We will add another dimension that represents the color. The card symbols now represent Row Labels.
We will add the color as Column Labels. As you can see, there are categories where there are no cards. This already reveals some useful information.
Again, it provides the same value, the same information. It just depends on what best represents the story we want to communicate. The second and third cases might seem a bit complicated at first sight. Just imagine that we first divide the cards into the categories according to their color. Next we divide the cards into 4 and 4 categories according to the symbol.
In the case of the standard deck of 52, such a division in the categories is not very practical. It makes a lot of table cells to remain empty.
For simplicity, most of the tools simply skip the empty cells. Skipping the cells provides a more compressed result that is easier to read. Count of the totals in rows and columns can sometimes reveal another important information. Probably not in the case of the cards. Although, just have a look…. We can see that there are 26 red cards in total, 26 black cards in total and 13 cards with each of the symbols.
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