Pivot Tables in Excel – Easy Excel Tutorial

About Pivot Tables

Pivot tables are mainly used in Microsoft Excel for summarizing a huge number of data, stored in the sheet so that anyone can easily analyze the data with an organized view.

With the help of a Pivot table, you can transform an endless number of rows and columns into a meaningful representation to your viewers and they will quickly understand the meaning of each data contained in that Pivot table.

How to start with Pivot table

Before you know, how to create a Pivot table you should be aware of the basic difference between a Normal table and a Pivot table.

Normal tables are fixed but Pivot tables are flexible. Normal table shows us the entire data whereas Pivot table only shows us summarized data. Basically, you will use Pivot table to summarize a large amount of data by establishing a correlation between data fields and would like to show the view in a new way.

Ok, let’s know, how to create a Pivot table in Microsoft Excel 2013 and it will be quite same for all other versions of Microsoft Excel.

Suppose, you have a big chunk of data in the spreadsheet and you don’t want to use all data or get difficulties to find your required data then you can use a Pivot table to summarize those data in a new table view like the below sheet.

The next question will how to generate a Pivot table for such kind of sheet. Well, for that, you first need to go the Insert tab → Pivot table, then just click it. The Following screen will pop up before you-

Then you can select the pivot table location as an existing sheet or new sheet likewise. For this tutorial, we are going to select, New worksheet and click OK.

There is also an option for you to select the range, so that you can define the data range of your column and row numbers to work with.

The screen will be like this, the bluish shaded area of the screen is marked up to easily find out the portion.

Now, the following screen will come up,

And, then you have to choose some fields from the Field List (Right Side of the screen).

You can drag single fields or multiple fields from the above pane to the below areas entitled as Filters, COLS, ROWS, VALUES.  These specific areas will help you to, build a meaningful report as you required.

Let’s talk about these field areas a bit,

Report Filter: You can set any fields to filter your report from the Pivot table. But, I recommend you to set the relevant field to do that. Suppose for the table you can use EST. Visits as a filter to find your required data.

COLS: A field that has a column orientation in the pivot table. Each item in the field occupies a column. You can choose any fields from your data table to view the columns on your report.

ROWS: Same like columns and here each item in the fields occupies a row. By selecting any fields (relevant one) you can show your report on Pivot table.

Like, Title, URL can be used as ROWS for the above data table.

VAULES: This fields occupies cells in a Pivot table and summarize data in a several ways such as: by calculating – Sum, Count, Average and so on.

e.g., for above table, you can use No as Count of No to find out how many times the Title is mentioned in the data table.

Basically, you have to relate the data and fields in the table first then based on those relationship you can use those field areas to build an appropriate report on Pivot table.

Below screen will clarify some points for you,

Hope, you have got some clear concept about how pivot table works on Microsoft Excel and I believe, you will be able to create a Pivot table by your own.

For mastering this tutorial, I suggest you to use various sort of demo data and create a Pivot table based on those data. Do it over and over and don’t stop your practice! You will be a Pro within a couple of days. Best of luck and stay with tutorialabc.com for learning purpose. Have a good day.

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