Excel® 2007 PivotTables and PivotCharts

Chapter 4. Changing the PivotTable View

Move a Field to a Different Area

A PivotTable is a powerful data analysis tool because it can take hundreds or even thousands of records and summarize them into a compact, comprehensible report. However, unlike most of Excel's other data analysis features, a PivotTable is not a static collection of worksheet cells. Instead, you can move a PivotTable's fields from one area of the PivotTable to another. This enables you to view your data from different perspectives, which can greatly enhance the analysis of the data. Moving a field within a PivotTable is called pivoting the data.

The most common way to pivot the data is to move fields between the row and column areas. If your PivotTable contains just a single nondata field, moving the field between the row and column areas changes the orientation of the PivotTable between horizontal (column area) and vertical (row area). If your PivotTable contains fields in both the row and column areas, pivoting one of those fields to the other area creates multiple fields in that area. For example, pivoting a field from the column area to the row area creates two fields in the row area. This changes how the data breaks down, as described in Chapter 3; see the section “Add Multiple Fields to the Row or Column Area.”

You can also pivot data by moving a row or column field to the page area, and a page field to the row or column area. This is a useful technique when you want to turn one of your existing row or columns ...