Excel Pivot Table Tutorial Part 1 - What is a Pivot Table in Excel?
This Pivot Table tutorial begins by addressing the common question "What is a Pivot Table in Excel?".
Excel Pivot Tables are tables, that are produced by Excel, to summarise large amounts of data in a spreadsheet. This is best explained by way of an example...
Imagine your company keeps a spreadsheet of every sale that is made. The spreadsheet records the sale date, the invoice reference, the invoice total, the salesperson, and the sales region. This spreadsheet is shown below:
| A | B | C | D | E | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Date | Invoice Ref | Amount | Sales Rep. | Region |
| 2 | 05/01/2010 | 2010-0001 | $33,242 | Smith | North |
| 3 | 07/01/2010 | 2010-0002 | $41,234 | Barnes | South |
| 4 | 08/01/2010 | 2010-0003 | $3,255 | Brown | North |
| 5 | 12/01/2010 | 2010-0004 | $34,124 | Brown | North |
| 6 | 15/01/2010 | 2010-0005 | $4,312 | Smith | North |
| 7 | 19/01/2010 | 2010-0006 | $41,233 | Jones | South |
| 8 | 22/01/2010 | 2010-0007 | $10,313 | Smith | North |
| 9 | 30/01/2010 | 2010-0008 | $26,001 | Jones | South |
| 10 | 02/02/2010 | 2010-0009 | $34,234 | Barnes | South |
| 11 | . . . |
. . . |
. . . |
. . . |
. . . |
An Excel pivot table can summarise the data in the spreadsheet above, so that you can see, the number or sums of any of the fields, at a glance.
For example, the pivot table on the right shows the total sum of all sales, for each of the four sales people, for the whole of the 2010 sales year.
A more complex pivot table is shown below. In this pivot table, the sales totals are broken down by month for each sales person. The sales totals for each area are also shown.
For the time being, don't worry about how the above pivot tables are produced. This section of the tutorial simply aims to answer the question "What is a Pivot Table in Excel?". Therefore, for now, it is more important that you simply understand the purpose and usefulness of Pivot Tables.
