Pivot tables: What are they?

[Zerex71]

Greetings,

In all my years of Excel-dom, I have never used pivot tables, and have
only the rawest understanding of what they are. I got the impression
from skimming the Excel help that they are useful if you have several
batches of data in multiple tables, but they are set up to take up only
the space of one table based on a selection key...or something like
that. (For instance, Excel can contain three M x N sets of data, but
the user must select a key of some kind and then Excel will display the
proper data set, such as M1 x N1, etc.)

At least that is my understanding of it. If anyone could shed some
plain-English light on this, I would appreciate it. I'm sure there's
lot of applications I could use them for but I have never delved that
deeply into the topic. Thanks.

Mike

 

[Puppet_Sock]

Zerex71 wrote:
[pivot table angst]

You need to start by carefully reading the help files that come
with Excel. There's an entire tutorial in there, with examples of
creating and modifying pivot tables.
Socks

 

[Harald Staff]

Hi Mike

A Pivot table is a very fast and flexible data analysis / data summary tool
that leaves the real data material untouched. They are at their best working
on a single data source, a huge table or dataset, the multi table support
isn't good.

See http://www.cpearson.com/excel/pivots.htm and spend 10 minutes doing the
demo described. It's very simple, and it may give you an idea of the
flexibility and speed involved.

Once you get into Pivot tables, you can't imagine how you managed without
them.

HTH. Best wishes Harald

 

[Dave Peterson]

Do you ever use data|sort followed by data|subtotals to get summary
counts/sums/averages? And if you never cared about the details (maybe you used
the outlining symbols on the left after data|subtotals to hide those details),
then investing a little bit of time in learning pivottables will be well worth
it.

Here are a few more links:

Debra Dalgleish's pictures at Jon Peltier's site:
http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Pivots/pivottables.htm
And Debra's own site:
http://www.contextures.com/xlPivot01.html

John Walkenbach also has some at:
http://j-walk.com/ss/excel/files/general.htm
(look for Tony Gwynn's Hit Database)

Chip Pearson keeps Harald Staff's notes at:
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/pivots.htm

MS has some at (xl2000 and xl2002):
http://office.microsoft.com/downloads/2000/XCrtPiv.aspx
http://office.microsoft.com/assistance/2002/articles/xlconPT101.aspx

 

[Zerex71]

Thanks to those who explained them to me, I greatly appreciated it! I
may use them in my future work. I will check those links for help.

Mike