Getting Great Results with Excel Pivot Tables, PowerQuery and PowerPivot

CHAPTER 1Preparing the Data for an Excel Pivot Table

If you are like most office workers, you probably have tons of data coming from all directions that you somehow must summarize and make it all make sense. Maybe it is endless lists of sales, bills, invoices, customers, vendors, employees, benefits, payments, orders, products, inventory, collections, books, charges, or countless other possible lists. Additionally, it seems that the lists of information come from all different sources, and it never ends.

When I started in IT a long time ago, it was pretty much up to the IT team to gather all the data and then make reports and charts from the data. At the time, programming languages such as COBOL, Fortran, Basic, Pascal, ColdFusion, VBA, dBase, FoxPro, and others were used to write long, complex programs that would open the data file, go through the file record by record, clean up the data if necessary, accumulate totals, and then finally generate the reports or charts that were asked for. It was a time-consuming process that was prone to errors and many other challenges.

For most companies, those days are long gone. Now it is up to you, the individual, or the people you work with to gather all the data from different sources and make some kind of sense out of it. Somehow you are expected to know how to sort, filter, summarize, chart, and report on the data for the next staff meeting to show something meaningful from the data. Oh, and, by the way, the meeting is this afternoon! ...