Excel Pivot Tables 101

If you’ve heard about pivot tables in Excel and you’re unsure of how to get started, don’t worry because we’ve got you covered. According to industry professionals, pivot tables can be described as being magnifying glasses for the data you’ve acquired. Read on as we dive further into PivotTables 101 in Excel!

When you have a rather large range of data on your Excel sheet, you’ll want to thoroughly examine all of it to ensure that you don’t miss anything out. And if you’re working with every little detail, then using pivot tables are the perfect solution for you. Additionally, there are also several reasons as to why pivot tables are exceptionally important.

Simply put, every business no matter what field you are in, heavily runs on the analysis of data. And since software tracks every little aspect in your business, pivot tables are very useful for discovering shocking insights that you’ve probably never thought about and they present a very detailed summary of everything. If you’re going to succeed as an analyst, you’re going to need to get down and dirty with huge chunks of raw data.

If you’re wondering where exactly this data comes from well, they’ll come from your sales force or even your resource planning department and don’t forget about accounting.

Generating a Pivot Table

You’ll firstly need to highlight all the data that you wish to pivot.

Then you’ll need to head over to insert and select pivot table.

After you’ve done the previous steps, you’ll need to determine if you’re going to need a new sheet or use your current sheet to place your newly created table.

Then the last step is to click “Finish” and that’s it, you’ve just created your own pivot table.

How to Populate Your Table

Each column seen represents your data and the names displayed are going to be the same as the column names you had.

Now, you’ll need to click and drag field to your columns, rows or even any value section to completely populate your table. Simply put, your rows will populate the tables rows and your columns will populate the tables columns. However, the value section behaves somewhat differently than your typical columns and rows!

You’ll also want to add filters to your tables to properly organize them. You’ll need to navigate to the cell that you desire to filter and then you should right click on it in order for the filter option to come up. However, with the use of this option, you’re only able to retain or exclude this particular selection. Additionally, you can also filter your table with the use of the filter pane.

You’ll need to simply drag the fields that you wish to filter into the field list section. At this point you are now able to filter specific items with the use of the drop down.

As we conclude we have just looked at Pivot Tables 101 in Excel. And we have also gone into some details about filtering your data. Be sure to keep in mind that pivot tables give you the extra edge for proper analysis!