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.