- [Instructor] A pivot table is a very powerful tool
in Excel.
It allows you to very quickly summarize your data.
You can see trends, you can get data results,
you can filter things.
And the best part about pivot tables
is that you can see my rows and columns here of data.
It's going to leave these completely intact.
So I can play around with the data all I want,
and I never have to worry about ruining my actual file.
For a pivot table to work,
the very first thing that has to happen
is you need to make sure you don't have any empty rows
or columns.
And it also needs a heading.
To get started, change to the insert ribbon tab
and click pivot table.
Excel will start by selecting the data,
and this is why you can't have any empty columns or rows.
It needs to select everything.
And now I can choose where I want
the pivot table to be placed.
Now if you have a small amount of data,
you can put it on this existing worksheet
if you have the room,
but I find it's easier just to put it on a new worksheet.
It's not going to put it in a new file, just in a new tab.
We'll click okay.
And as you can see, it created a brand new tab for me.
My original data is still here, perfectly intent.
And now we can start building our pivot table.
The key data is here on the right.
Here is all of our column headers.
Below here, we can specify our rows, our columns
our values that we want to summarize,
and we can put in any filter if we want to.
This is how pivot tables are really powerful.
All we can do, rephrase,
all we need to do is drag and drop these column headers,
and we can rearrange them and move them around.
And if something doesn't give you the desired results
that you wanted to see, you can put in something else.
For example, I want to see my product categories
and how they sold.
So if I scroll down, I can find my product category field.
I'm going to drag that into rows.
Instantly, on the left-hand side,
here's all the categories that I have.
Next, I want to see the quantity of units
that I sold of each one.
So we'll take the quantity and drag it into values.
So right away, we're seeing a sum of all the quantity
of the unit sold.
And it's pulling all of that data from here.
If I scroll, I can see my quantity.
Here's all my orders.
But, I want to qualify that data.
Where is it coming from?
Where's it selling?
We can do that by dragging the data into columns.
For example, which kind of customer type sold more units?
If I drag the customer type in,
here I can see them specified, business or individual.
I can see the data, this is the unit sold
and here's the grand total.
Now you can see here it says column labels.
So it's not exactly telling me what it is.
You can fix that.
If you head over to the design tab,
once we opened our pivot table, we got some new ribbon tabs
and I'll click report layout.
I can choose to show it in outline form.
And for whatever reason, this fixes it.
So you can see the field that you've selected here.
So we have our columns, rows and values.
We can add more.
For example,
let's say, I don't want to see it by customer type,
I can just drag this back up.
That's going to disappear
and now I can put something else in.
This is going to take up a lot of room,
but I can even find out which state sold the most units.
As you can see, I have a lot of scrolling to do,
but that's okay.
It's still pulling it from the spreadsheet.
I'm going to bring it back to that customer type.
Now we can even add multiple rows.
It's up to you if you want to do this,
but you can look at the order type.
For example, I'll drop that into the row.
And instantly it's added a whole nother dimension
to this report.
And as usual, if I don't want to see it again,
I can just drag it out the report.
This is how pivot reports are great.
At any time you can change this data.
You can move it around,
you can swap between columns and rows.
From here, you can take a screenshot
and put it into a presentation,
or just insert it into a presentation
directly from PowerPoint, from this Excel spreadsheet,
the possibilities are endless.
And if you decide, you're just playing around,
learning how pivot tables work, that's great.
At any time, you can always right click
and delete this worksheet.
Don't forget your data is still perfectly intact here,
it hasn't been touched.