Basic Excel Pivot Table Set Up
Michael Kan’s Tip of the Week blog has a good tutorial on setting up a basic Excel pivot table. Included in the tutorial is a nice clean description of how to use the pivot table wizard and the layout dialog box.
As demonstrated in Michael’s excel tutorial, I’ve found that using the pivot table wizard and the layout dialog is the fastest the easiest way to get a pivot table set up in Excel. Just remember that your data needs to be in a continuous block and that the top row must contain a header description.
A great tip included in Michael’s pivot table post is to double click data items in the layout dialog box. This seldom covered tip will allow you to correct the formatting and subtotal options during set up. In my experience, the default pivot tables formats leave a lot to be desired.
Basic Pivot Tables
Why It Matters To You
Pivot tables are one of the easiest analytical tools available to quickly summarize a large amount of data. They have their limitations, but as long as you understand where they are powerful and where they are limited, you should be good to go. I’ve written up a quick step by step of how to including a sample data set on which you can try out the Pivot table functionality.
Pivot tables are useful anytime you want to quickly summarize data (cross tabs). They a great for quickly creating a table of summary results and better yet, let you double-click to see all the detail underlying any specific value. The drop downs at the X, Y, and page level let you quickly filter data for very specific looks at your data.
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