The details for each step are shown below. Here are the 3 preparation steps that I recommend you follow, before building your first few pivot tables. Being prepared can save you lots of time and help you avoid problems later!

There are a few important things for you to do, before you build a pivot table. Excel did all the construction work for me, and it only took a minute or so! You can use pivot tables instead of old-style Excel reports, that take a long time to build, because they have typed headings and complicated formulas to calculate the totals.įor example, the pivot table in the screen shot below shows a summary of 500 sales orders. With a few mouse clicks, Excel builds the report for you, using your dataset, and it's easy to change the layout, at any time later. Click and drag a field to the Rows or Columns area.Download the Sample File What is a Pivot Table?Ī pivot table is a quick and flexible way to show a summary for thousands of rows of data in an Excel workbook.You can also turn on the PivotTable Fields pane by clicking the Field List button on the Analyze tab. Instead of creating a separate PivotTable, you can easily add the Name field as an additional row to expand the data that’s represented. After creating the PivotTable, your boss may request to see data for which agents made those sales.

Let’s refer back to our previous example, where we are only interested in seeing the monthly sales for each destination.

Remember, you can always drag fields out of the area you’ve added them to in the PivotTable Fields pane to remove them.

You may need to experiment with adding multiple fields to certain areas to see what works best for your set of data. However, if you make it too complex, the PivotTable will start to become difficult to consume. When adding fields to the Filters, Columns, Rows, and Values areas of a PivotTable, you aren’t limited to just adding one field you can add as many as you like.

Excel 2013 create pivot table options