One of the more prevalent uses of Microsoft Excel is saving large tables of information, and then wringing some quantity of interpreted information from that table. Unfortunately, many Excel users lean on an overuse of functions to interpret that information, when a pivot table would make their jobs easier. This needs to stop. Let’s start from the beginning:

This is a table of data. We have records that have categories like Department and Division, that contain numerical data like Hourly and Weekly Pay. Given this kind of data, I can foresee situations where you’ll need to show the total amount we pay out every week, or the average we pay per hour for a Development employee. You can very easily write a function to average the amount of money we pay to Researchers from Vermont, but what if we needed to get a summary report for all the averages? Or, what if we needed to quickly swap between totals, averages, and maximums? The most efficient solution is the Pivot Table. To create a pivot table, first select the data by clicking on the table. Then, choose the Insert Tab on the Ribbon and click the Pivot Table button.

Now we have the Pivot Table environment, and we need to populate it to generate table. There are two different ways of building the table, but both involve the same fields and information. Take a look at option 1, the actual table area.

The simplest way to think through the building of the table is this: in a typical table, we see data in the center of the table to be calculated. If, for instance, we were filling this with quarterly sales information, the center of the table would be the dollar amounts. Additionally, the quarterly sales table would have labels on the left and top of the table. These labels would hold information like ‘Quarter 1′, and ‘Region 1′. Think about these labels. Quarters 1, 2, 3, 4… these are categories, of which there are only a few. We probably wouldn’t have 100+ labels across the top of the sales table.

Take exactly this idea to populate the pivot table: fill the center with number values, and place categories across the top and left sides of the table. We can use the fields in the screen shot above, or we can use the panel on the right side of the screen:

So, we take things like Department and Division, and drag them to the appropriate areas, and the same for Gross Pay. The new information in these areas will look like this in the panel:

The final result:

There is a TON of customization that can be done to this table – plenty of material for more tutorials! In the meantime, check out our Excel and Excel 2007 courses. Day Two contains the information about Pivot Tables.

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