What is a Pivot Table?
You may have heard about Pivot Tables, What are they? What should you use them for? In fact, in today's world many interviewees are asked whether or not they can do a pivot table. So it would seem that creating and utilising pivot tables is an essential skill in today's working world.
The above video tutorial will show you how to create a Pivot Table out of a long list of data. So instead of you having to manually calculate your totals, a pivot table will run a calculation on groups.
One of the things you'll get from looking at this Pivot Table sample Excel sheet is how you need to structure your data before you create a Pivot Table. The standard row/column format is essential before embarking on the Pivot Table journey. Your data types need to be consistent as well. So should you have a column with the heading "Purchase_Date" you shouldn't have text or numbers that aren't dates within that column.
You can see in the above tutorial I have a list of products and a list of categories. If I wanted to find the subtotals of all the products sold, for example, how much money I made for each product, I could create a pivot table to do this automatically for me.
Pivot tables will also help you with regards to analysing data by dates. Pivot Tables automatically create what is known as a hierarchy, breaking down your revenue by year, quarter and month.
To help you in your creation of pivot tables, it is advisable to base the data source on a table. To fully understand what that means please see our help tutorial on creating tables in Excel.
Use the Create a Pivot Table in Excel Exercise File if you want to follow along with this tutorial.
You may have to click on enable editing in Excel to be able to complete the exercise.