Using Pivot tables in Excel

It’s not hard to create a pivot table in Excel as long as you understand how pivot works. A pivot table is always based on a set of data that consists of several columns. The first row of the column must contain the name of the respective category. The pivot table automatically retrieves its information from this. It also makes sense to format the table as such (using the “format as table” function) and assign a table name. This makes the work easier, especially with several data sets.

There are two ways to create a pivot table in Excel: you can either navigate to the PivotTable function in the “Insert” tab, or you can use the table tools. However, this is only an option if you have formatted your data set as a table. Here, you can see the function “Summarize with PivotTable”. The same window is opened this way, but the corresponding section is already selected. In the template, users can decide where the new pivot table should appear: within an existing spreadsheet or in a new one.

Pivot tables provide countless functions that are extremely useful in the evaluation of data. The versatility of pivot in Excel is best described by means of an example. We’ve already created the pivot table itself; it contains a data set with a list of sales for one year. This includes the employees involved, the turnover, and the type of product sold. Note that the data set is a simple table with only the columns labeled and not the rows.

The new spreadsheet, in which data should now appear in the form of a pivot table, is completely empty at the beginning. However, the window should now have a new sidebar: the PivotTable Fields. The categories that you’ve defined for the columns of the data set should appear there. There are also four areas in the sidebar where you can drag the PivotTable Fields:

• Filters
• Columns
• Rows
• Values

By distributing the fields into the relevant areas, you are creating the actual pivot table. In general, it makes sense to define a field for the column names and one for the rows. Under “Filters”, you can specify the categories that you would like to view in the history, e.g. those you would like to view in isolation. The area of most interest is “Values”. Fields entered here become the main focus of the table.

In our example, we enter the months in the rows and the employees in the columns. The pivot table automatically analyzes the information it receives from the data set and determines that twelve different months and four different employees were involved. The two product types are applied to the filters, allowing us to evaluate the table according to Package A or Package B.

Finally, our sales are reported under “Values”. Excel creates the table automatically: a table with category appropriate columns and rows is created from the original table with four columns related to the data set.

In our case, Excel automatically determines the amount of sales per month and per employee. Instead of the original monetary values, placing them under “Values” directly results in the “Count of sales”. This gives the user the option of placing the blank figures into context and then evaluating them this way: Laura made two sales in April. The pivot table also displays the overall results automatically: there were 3 sales in the month of June, and 24 sales for the whole year.

If you are more interested in the monetary value of the sales, and less so in the number of sales transactions, this can easily be altered. To do so, click on “Sales” in the “Values” field and navigate to the “Value field settings”. Here, under “Summarize values by”, change “Count” to “Sum“. As you can see, many other types of display are also available (the calculation types correspond to the Excel functions).

For monetary values, it makes sense to have them displayed in the appropriate currencies. By clicking on the “Number format” button, you will be brought to a window that allows you to format cells (this is also available when working normally with Excel). From here, you can choose different formats as well as currencies.