Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Analyzing and Viewing Your Data

Like a good piece of Swiss Army Software, Excel provides tools that go beyond the basics. Using features like PivotTables, Scenarios, and Goal Seeking, Excel lets you sharpen your powers of visualization as you look at your data in new and interesting ways.

Making a PivotTable

A PivotTable is a special spreadsheet entity that helps summarize data into an easy-to-read table. You can exchange the table’s rows and columns (thus the name PivotTable) to achieve different views on your data. PivotTables let you quickly plug different sets of numbers into a table; Excel does the heavy lifting of arranging the data for you.

PivotTables are useful when you want to see how different-but-related totals compare, such as how a retail store’s sales per department, category of product, and salesperson relate. They let you build complicated tables on the fly by dragging various categories of data into a premade template. PivotTables are also useful when you have a large amount of data to wade through, partially because Excel takes care of subtotals and totals for you.

Here’s how to create a PivotTable from data in an Excel sheet.

Step 1: Choose the data source

Suppose, for example, that you’re the Executive Director for a community non-profit, trying to decide which fundraisers bring in the most donors for the time and money spent. You have a spreadsheet showing four years’ worth of data on five different fundraisers (such as each event’s revenue, number of new donors, ...