Managing Data with Microsoft® Excel

Understanding Pivot Tables

Pivot tables are Excel's most powerful means of summarizing data. Whether you're interested in totaling expenses on a monthly basis, or finding the average income earned by people in various jobs, or getting a count of the number of items you've sold by product line, a pivot table is usually the way to do it in Excel.

Because of their summary capabilities, pivot tables are tools not only for data analysis but also for data management. If you haven't yet used pivot tables extensively, you'll find this section a useful introduction. If you're an experienced user, you might prefer to skip ahead to the next section, “Preparing Data for Pivot Tables.”

Building a Pivot Table

Figure 6.1 shows a simple example of a pivot table ...