One of Microsoft Excel’s most potent and intimidating features is the pivot table. Strong in that it can aid in summarizing and understanding extensive data collection. It’s daunting since pivot tables have a history of becoming difficult, and you’re not quite an Excel pro.
The remarkable thing is that it’s far more straightforward than you would have been led to think to learn how to make a pivot table in Excel.
But first, let’s step back and understand exactly what such a pivot table is and whether you might have to utilize it instead before we lead you into the creation process.
A Pivot Table: What Is It?
Maintaining track of the information gets challenging when sheets include more than just a few rows or columns. Additionally, if you lose track of information, you lose track of its significance. This is where the Excel pivot table comes in; it analyzes and summarises your data according to your defined standards.
Consider attentively keeping track of every expenditure you incur during the year in a separate spreadsheet. When you take a seat to evaluate at the end of each year, you’ll need help sifting among thousands of submissions. You can only view an ocean of rows and columns in what is known as flat data. You must consider the data interactively to get a greater understanding and context. For instance, check your most recent current quarter utility and rent expenses. You can carry out that using a pivot table.
That’s only one little example. An infinite number of different types of information can be analyzed using a pivot table. You can utilize the same data and modify it in the pivot table to gain novel insights each time, negating the need to build a new spreadsheet for every study.
HOW Do I Set Up An Excel Pivot Table?
First, create a table from the data range.
You can build a pivot table in Excel from a range, but we highly urge that you do so instead because doing so makes it much easier to add or remove data subsequently.
Before using the data set or table to generate an Excel pivot table, keep the following guidelines in mind:
There needs to be a heading for each column. You can only make a pivot table if one is present.
All rows should indeed be occupied. There won’t be any empty rows, just the occasional blank cell. This may cause some problems.
Step 2:Click the Build Pivot Table Wizard
Once your selection has been converted to a table (use Ctrl-T to do this quickly! ). Next, you must choose a column in that table and choose Pivot Table from the far-left menu under Import on the ribbons.
The Build Pivot Table Wizard appears, allowing you to begin choosing your Pivot Table choices.
Step 3: Determine the Pivot Table’s Input Table or Range.
Excel will prompt you to choose the column or region as the first choice you’ll see. Excel had done the legwork for us by selecting that table as our range of data because we had built a table and were clicking into that table when we decided to add the pivot table.
Step 4: Determine Where to Place the Pivot Table
Decide whether to construct your pivot table in a new or existing spreadsheet. Your initial Pivot Table has been produced once you click OK. Yay.
The accompanying screen will display an empty table on the left and a list of alternatives on the right. These choices are the fields of the pivot table, and it is here that the magic begins. In part after this, I’ll demonstrate how to do this.
