Excel® Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts: Your visual blueprint™ for creating dynamic spreadsheets

Appendix B. Using Microsoft Query with Excel Pivottables

Understanding Microsoft Query

If you want to build a PivotTable using a sorted, filtered, subset of an external data source, you must use Microsoft Query to specify the sorting and filtering options and the subset of the source data that you want to work with.

Databases such as those used in Microsoft Access and SQL Server are often very large and contain a wide variety of data scattered over many different tables. When your data analysis requires a PivotTable, you can never use an entire database as the source for the report. Instead, you can extract a subset of the database: a table or perhaps two or three related tables. You may also require the data to be sorted in a certain way and you ...