Using and Creating Pivot Tables in Excel (A Tutorial For Dummies)

What is a Pivot Table? - Examples

(I would highly recommend that you go over the tutorial videos in the order they appear - starting from the top downwards, because every video is advancing a step further the concept taught in the former one).

What is a pivot table? Well, it might be just the most powerful and efficient feature of Microsoft Excel.

With it you can summarize a table’s data by its different fields (its columns), and to easily make all the desired intersections between them.

For example, if you are given a table of company employees with the following fields:

- Employee name
- Department
- Car ownership
- Salary
- Number of monthly working hours

Then you can easily use a pivot table to retrieve the following information:
- Count the total number of employees in every department.
- Count the total number of employees with a car and without a car.
- The average salary of employees with a car, and of employees without a car.
- The average salary of employees with a car and without a car, for every single department.
- The highest number of monthly working hours inside every department.
…and the combinations are endless.

You can find such examples in the videos presented above. They are demonstrating the subjects in a step-by-step "pivot tables for dummies" manner.

After creating it and getting the basics, you can go ahead with using advanced features: format it, sort it, group dates and numerical ranges together, filter items outside, switch between rows and columns, apply different statistical functions to the data (sum, count, average etc.), change and refresh the original data and see how it is reflected on the report, create a chart from it …and this list of possibilities can go on…