How to Make Pivot Tables in Excel
Pivot tables are a great way to make summaries out of large amounts of data. They help you to reduce a large number of cells into a single table, allowing you to easily analyze the data and present it in a much more meaningful way.
The first thing you need to do to make a pivot table is to format your data properly. This means that your data should be separated into separate columns with headers and each data type should be formatted as text, numbers or date.
Once your data has been formatted, you can now create a pivot table in Excel. To do this, go to the Insert tab on the ribbon and click on the table group.
When you are prompted to select a source data range, choose the data that you want to use in your pivot table. It is advisable to not include any cells that have been merged across adjacent rows, because this can cause problems with the table’s grouping features.
You can also include cells from a different sheet, if they are a subset of the original data. Just make sure to refresh the original data range when you update it in your pivot table.
Next, you can move your data to the PivotTable Fields window. This window will allow you to see all of the tables in your workbook and to select which ones you want to add into the pivot table.
Then, you can drag the values from each table into your pivot table. For example, let’s say we have a table that has sales records in it. We can then put those records into the Tables quadrant and the values that we want to show in the Values quadrant.
For example, we could put the sales totals for each month into the Rows quadrant and then we could put the departments that were sold to into the Columns quadrant. This is a pretty good idea, because it will allow us to see the totals for each department in addition to the total sales for the company as a whole.
This is very useful, because it will enable you to do many more calculations and summaries from your pivot table. If you have a lot of data, this can save a lot of time.
You should also check that you have no blank or empty cells in your pivot table, because this can lead to bloated tables and incorrect results. It’s also a good idea to create a new worksheet for your pivot table, so that you can keep track of your data and not accidentally mix up a range of data that is already on the same sheet.
Finally, you can also add filters to your pivot table to further limit the amount of data that you view. This can be a great way to show your data to clients or stakeholders in a more meaningful way. For example, you could add a filter that would allow you to display the results of your data only for customers who have purchased the same product in a particular region.