Pivot Table Data Crunching: Microsoft® Excel® 2010

Introduction

In This Introduction

What You Will Learn from This Book 1

What Is New in Excel 2010’s Pivot Tables 2

Skills Required to Use This Book 3

Case Study: Life Before Pivot Tables 3

Invention of the Pivot Table 5

Case Study: Life After Pivot Tables 7

Sample Files Used in This Book 8

Conventions Used in This Book 8

Pivot tables are the single most powerful command in all of Excel. They came along during the 1990s 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-1990s led to many incredible features, but none as powerful as the pivot table.

With a pivot table, you can take 1 million rows of transactional ...