Excel Data Analysis For Dummies, 5th Edition

Chapter 16

Ten Ways to Raise Your PivotTable Game

IN THIS CHAPTER

Changing the PivotTable view

Getting fancy with PivotTable styles

Modifying PivotTable options

Extracting PivotTable values for your formulas

Excel comes with so many powerful data-analysis tools and features that you might be wondering why you need to learn yet another: the PivotTable. The short answer is that the PivotTable is a useful weapon to add to your data-analysis arsenal. The long answer is that PivotTables are worth learning because they come with not just one or two but a long list of benefits.

Let me count the ways: PivotTables are straightforward to build and maintain; they perform large and complex calculations amazingly fast; you can quickly update them to account for new data; PivotTables are dynamic, so components can be easily moved, filtered, and added to; and, finally, PivotTables can use most of the formatting options that you can apply to regular Excel ranges and cells.

Oh, wait, there’s one more: PivotTables are fully customizable, so you can build each report the way you want. That customizability ...