Pivot Table Data Crunching

Introduction

In this Introduction

What You Will Learn from This Book 1

Skills Required to Use This Book 2

The Invention of the Pivot Table 4

Conventions Used in This Book 7

Pivot tables are the single most powerful feature in all of Excel. They came along during the 90s when Microsoft and Lotus were locked in a bitter battle for dominance of the spreadsheet market. The race to continually add enhanced features to their respective products during the mid-90s led to many incredible features, but none as powerful as the pivot table.

With a pivot table, you can take 65,000 rows of transactional data and transform it into a summary report in seconds. If you can drag a mouse, you can create a pivot table. In addition to quickly summarizing and calculating ...