Special Edition Using Microsoft® Office XP

Secrets of the Office Masters: Grouping Items in a PivotTable

Excel PivotTables are capable of splitting data into groups, even when you haven't organized your data in advance. This is a powerful feature that's useful in a variety of circumstances. When you choose to group data in a PivotTable, Excel analyzes the field you've chosen and displays a dialog box with choices that are appropriate for that type of data. For example, if you have a year's worth of daily sales figures, you might want to group them by week, by month, or by quarter. If you have a product catalog in which each row contains a product name, its category, and a price, you might want to group the list of products by category, and then by price within groups: $1.00–$10.00, $10.01–$20.00, ...