Excel® 2010 Workbook for Dummies®

Chapter 20. Generating Pivot Tables

In This Chapter

• Understanding how pivot tables summarize data and enable you to analyze data lists

• Filtering a pivot table with the new Slicers feature

• Creating a new pivot table

• Changing the summary function used in the pivot table

• Formatting a pivot table and changing pivot table options

• Creating a pivot chart with your pivot table

Excel's pivot tables and charts enable you to quickly and extemporaneously summarize vast amounts of spreadsheet data. As such, they're often considered to be the most versatile of the program's many data analysis features, if not its coolest and most powerful. In this chapter, you get the chance to practice creating and using pivot tables and charts to see how they can help reveal complex relationships in the data that might otherwise go completely unnoticed.

Working with Pivot Tables

Pivot tables are great for summarizing particular values in a data list or database table because they do their magic without requiring you to create formulas to perform their calculations. Unlike the Subtotals feature, another summarizing feature you encountered in Chapter 17, pivot tables let you play around with the arrangement of the summarized data, even after you generate the table. (The Subtotals feature only lets you hide and display different levels of totals in the list.) It's this capability to change the arrangement of the summarized data by rotating row and column headings that gives the pivot table its name.

Pivot tables are also ...