Pivot Tables are one of the most powerful tools in Excel. This guide will show to how to create a Pivot Table in a few simple steps.
Create a Pivot Table
- Select the data to use for the Pivot Table (including data headers)
- Click the Insert ribbon, and click PivotTable
- Select the location where the Pivot Table should be placed. This can either be a new worksheet, or a cell reference on an existing worksheet. In this example we’ll place the Pivot Table on the same worksheet in cell N5. Click OK.
- Now the pivot table is created and it’s time to add some data by dragging fields from the PivotTable Field List to the areas below (Report filter, row labels, column labels, values).
- In the example below we’ve dragged the Sub-Category field down to the Row Labels area, and the Sales Total field down to the Values area.
This automatically creates a table which sums the Sales Totals for each Sub-Category of product. Pivot Table fields are interchangeable and can be moved around to analyze data with only a few clicks.
The values within the pivot table will update automatically if changes are made to the columns or rows. For example, adding dragging region down to the columns area of the pivot table will show us sales by sub-category by region.
With a few simple clicks we can slice and dice the data in a way that allows us to understand where sales of different types of products are coming from by region in this example.
