Office 2013 In Depth

Creating Outlines and Subtotals

The Ribbon’s Data tab also provides an Outline group that provides the Group, Ungroup, and Subtotal commands. The Group command enables you to create outline groups in a worksheet. The groups can then be individually expanded or collapsed, so you can hide information at a particular outline level and view only a summary of the data (such as sales totals by regions or salary data by department) rather than each individual row of data.

The purpose of an outline is to take advantage of a hierarchy that is already present in the worksheet. If you think about a text outline, it is made up of different levels of information such as primary levels, secondary levels, and so on. In Excel, the hierarchy is based on logical ...