Chapter 2. Building a PivotTable

Prepare Your Worksheet Data

The most common method for building a PivotTable is to use data that exists in an Excel worksheet. You can make this task much easier by taking a few minutes to prepare your worksheet data for use in the PivotTable. Ensuring your data is properly prepared will also ensure that your PivotTable contains accurate and complete summaries of the data.

Preparing your worksheet data for use in a PivotTable is not difficult or time-consuming. At a minimum, you must ensure that the data is organized in a row-and-column format, with unique headings at the top of each column and accurate and consistent data — all numbers or all text — within each column. You also need to remove blank rows, turn off ...

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