Special Edition Using Microsoft® Office XP

Creating a PivotTable

To create a PivotTable from an existing list, start with Excel's PivotTable Wizard. In this simple three-step process, Excel prompts you for basic details about the PivotTable you want to create, including the location of the data source and where you want the PivotTable to appear. After you finish with the wizard, you'll be able to lay out your data directly on the worksheet.

Excel 2000 introduced the capability to create and edit a PivotTable layout directly on the sheet—an enormous improvement over the same feature in Excel 97, which required that you edit PivotTable layouts in a dialog box. The Layout dialog box is still available, however, and on slow machines or with extremely large lists, you might prefer to use this ...