From the course: Excel: PivotTables in Depth

Introduce PivotTables

From the course: Excel: PivotTables in Depth

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Introduce PivotTables

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- [Instructor] Before I go into the details of how to create and manipulate pivot tables, I'd like to demonstrate a few of the ways that pivot tables help you analyze your worksheet data. I have opened my sample file, 01_01_introduction, and I'm on sheet two, which has a pivot table. And this pivot table might look a lot like a cross tab that you would create in your own worksheets by hand. So I have column labels for my two different types of customers, business and individual, and then a range of sales associates based on their job title. However, a pivot table is a lot more than just a static representation of your data. Over on the right you can see the pivot table fields task pane, and the task pane contains the tools that you can use to manipulate and change the appearance of your pivot table. At the top is the field list, and these are all the fields that are available for use within the pivot table. Any one that has a green check mark next to it, such as employee title, customer type, and then all the way at the bottom, order total, means that they currently appear within the pivot table. The fields area below that has a number of areas currently in use. Columns, which has my column headers for customer type, rows for the row headers, that's employee title, and then the values are currently displaying sum of order total, and that reflects the organization within the pivot table I described earlier. If I want to change the organization of the pivot table, I can drag fields from place to place. So in the pivot table fields task pane, I'll drag customer type below rows, employee title, and I have business and individual sales for each of my employee titles or employee levels. If I want to change the order or organization of the fields and have customer type on top, then I can drag employee title below customer type within the rows area, and I have customer type as the top level of organization, and then the employee titles below that. If I want to filter my data, for example, you can narrow it down to just senior sales associate and senior sales representative, then I can do that by adding a filter. So go up to the row labels control, click its down arrow, and then employee title is already selected. I could also select customer type, and then I will clear the select all checkbox and then click senior sales associate and senior sales representative and okay, and my filter has been applied. One final thing that I'll show you is how to change the appearance of your data by applying a style. I'll click a cell within the body of the pivot table and you can see the style has already been applied. If you want to change it, then go to the design contextual tab of the ribbon, which appears when you have a cell within a pivot table selected, and then go to the pivot styles gallery and select a style. I will go with Light blue, pivot style medium six, just as an example, and you can see how its appearance has changed. I hope this brief demonstration has given you a feel for pivot table's capabilities. In the remaining movies in this course, I'll go into much more detail on how to create and manipulate pivot tables and the data they contain.

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