Managing Data with Microsoft® Excel

Transposing Rows and Columns

Excel is not a database management system. It is not, for example, designed to manage the relationship between parent and child records. To extend the example in the previous section, a PO is a parent record and invoices are child records because each invoice—the child record—belongs to a PO—the parent record.

Still, Excel has some rudimentary database features, among them the AutoFilter and the Advanced Filter. These two filters in particular depend on a particular orientation of your data, called lists. In Excel, a list has these characteristics:

• Each record (each person, each product, each invoice) occupies a different row.

• Each variable (for example, name and address, or model and price, or invoice date and amount) ...