What is pivot table what is pivot table in excel

If you are reading this tutorial, there is a big chance you have heard of (or even used) the Excel Pivot Table. It’s one of the most powerful features in Excel (no kidding).

The best part about using a Pivot Table is that even if you don’t know anything in  Excel, you can still do pretty awesome things with it with a very basic understanding of it.

Let’s get started.

Click here to download the sample data and follow along.

What is a Pivot Table and Why Should You Care?

A Pivot Table is a tool in Microsoft Excel that allows you to quickly summarize huge datasets (with a few clicks).

Even if you’re absolutely new to the world of Excel, you can easily use a Pivot Table. It’s as easy as dragging and dropping rows/columns headers to create reports.

Suppose you have a dataset as shown below:

This is sales data that consists of ~1000 rows.

It has the sales data by region, retailer type, and customer.

Now your boss may want to know a few things from this data:

• What were the total sales in the South region in 2016?
• What are the top five retailers by sales?
• How did The Home Depot’s performance compare against other retailers in the South?

You can go ahead and use Excel functions to give you the answers to these questions, but what if suddenly your boss comes up with a list of five more questions.

You’ll have to go back to the data and create new formulas every time there is a change.

This is where Excel Pivot Tables comes in really handy.

Within seconds, a Pivot Table will answer all these questions (as you’ll learn below).

But the real benefit is that it can accommodate your finicky data-driven boss by answering his questions immediately.

It’s so simple, you may as well take a few minutes and show your boss how to do it himself.

Hopefully, now you have an idea of why Pivot Tables are so awesome. Let’s go ahead and create a Pivot Table using the data set (shown above).

Inserting a Pivot Table in Excel

Here are the steps to create a pivot table using the data shown above:

As soon as you click OK, a new worksheet is created with the Pivot Table in it.

While the Pivot Table has been created, you’d see no data in it. All you’d see is the Pivot Table name and a single line instruction on the left, and Pivot Table Fields on the right.

Now before we jump into analyzing data using this Pivot Table, let’s understand what are the nuts and bolts that make an Excel Pivot Table.

Also read: 10 Excel Pivot Table Keyboard Shortcuts

The Nuts & Bolts of an Excel Pivot Table

To use a Pivot Table efficiently, it’s important to know the components that create a pivot table.

In this section, you’ll learn about:

• Pivot Cache
• Values Area
• Rows Area
• Columns Area
• Filters Area

Pivot Cache

As soon as you create a Pivot Table using the data, something happens in the backend. Excel takes a snapshot of the data and stores it in its memory. This snapshot is called the Pivot Cache.

When you create different views using a Pivot Table, Excel does not go back to the data source, rather it uses the Pivot Cache to quickly analyze the data and give you the summary/results.

The reason a pivot cache gets generated is to optimize the pivot table functioning. Even when you have thousands of rows of data, a pivot table is super fast in summarizing the data. You can drag and drop items in the rows/columns/values/filters boxes and it will instantly update the results.

Note: One downside of pivot cache is that it increases the size of your workbook. Since it’s a replica of the source data, when you create a pivot table, a copy of that data gets stored in the Pivot Cache.

Read More: What is Pivot Cache and How to Best Use It.

Values Area

The Values Area is what holds the calculations/values.

Based on the data set shown at the beginning of the tutorial, if you quickly want to calculate total sales by region in each month, you can get a pivot table as shown below (we’ll see how to create this later in the tutorial).

The area highlighted in orange is the Values Area.

In this example, it has the total sales in each month for the four regions.

Rows Area

The headings to the left of the Values area makes the Rows area.

In the example below, the Rows area contains the regions (highlighted in red):

Columns Area

The headings at the top of the Values area makes the Columns area.

In the example below, Columns area contains the months (highlighted in red):

Filters Area

Filters area is an optional filter that you can use to further drill down in the data set.

For example, if you only want to see the sales for Multiline retailers, you can select that option from the drop down (highlighted in the image below), and the Pivot Table would update with the data for Multiline retailers only.

Analyzing Data Using the Pivot Table

Now, let’s try and answer the questions by using the Pivot Table we have created.

Click here to download the sample data and follow along.

To analyze data using a Pivot Table, you need to decide how you want the data summary to look in the final result. For example, you may want all the regions in the left and the total sales right next to it. Once you have this clarity in mind, you can simply drag and drop the relevant fields in the Pivot Table.

In the Pivot Tabe Fields section, you have the fields and the areas (as highlighted below):

The Fields are created based on the backend data used for the Pivot Table. The Areas section is where you place the fields, and according to where a field goes, your data is updated in the Pivot Table.

It’s a simple drag and drop mechanism, where you can simply drag a field and put it in one of the four areas. As soon as you do this, it will appear in the Pivot Table in the worksheet.

Now let’s try and answer the questions your manager had using this Pivot Table.

Q1: What were the total sales in the South region?

Drag the Region field in the Rows area and the Revenue field in the Values area. It would automatically update the Pivot Table in the worksheet.

Note that as soon as you drop the Revenue field in the Values area, it becomes Sum of Revenue. By default, Excel sums all the values for a given region and shows the total. If you want, you can change this to Count, Average, or other statistics metrics. In this case, the sum is what we needed.

The answer to this question would be 21225800.

Q2 What are the top five retailers by sales?

Drag the Customer field in the Row area and Revenue field in the values area. In case, there are any other fields in the area section and you want to remove it, simply select it and drag it out of it.

You’ll get a Pivot Table as shown below:

Note that by default, the items (in this case the customers) are sorted in an alphabetical order.

To get the top five retailers, you can simply sort this list and use the top five customer names. To do this:

This will give you a sorted list based on total sales.

Q3: How did The Home Depot’s performance compare against other retailers in the South?

You can do a lot of analysis for this question, but here let’s just try and compare the sales.

Drag the Region Field in the Rows area. Now drag the Customer field in the Rows area below the Region field. When you do this, Excel would understand that you want to categorize your data first by region and then by customers within the regions. You’ll have something as shown below:

Now drag the Revenue field in the Values area and you’ll have the sales for each customer (as well as the overall region).

You can sort the retailers based on the sales figures by following the below steps:

• Right-click on a cell that has the sales value for any retailer.
• Go to Sort –> Sort Largest to Smallest.

This would instantly sort all the retailers by the sales value.

Now you can quickly scan through the South region and identify that The Home Depot sales were 3004600 and it did better than four retailers in the South region.

Now there are more than one ways to skin the cat. You can also put the Region in the Filter area and then only select the South Region.

Click here to download the sample data.

I hope this tutorial gives you a basic overview of Excel Pivot Tables and helps you in getting started with it.

Here are some more Pivot Table Tutorials you may like:

• Preparing Source Data For Pivot Table.
• How to Apply Conditional Formatting in a Pivot Table in Excel.
• How to Group Dates in Pivot Tables in Excel.
• How to Group Numbers in Pivot Table in Excel.
• How to Filter Data in a Pivot Table in Excel.
• Using Slicers in Excel Pivot Table.
• How to Replace Blank Cells with Zeros in Excel Pivot Tables.
• How to Add and Use an Excel Pivot Table Calculated Fields.
• How to Refresh Pivot Table in Excel.

The pivot table is one of Microsoft Excel’s most powerful — and intimidating — functions. Pivot tables can help you summarize and make sense of large data sets. However, they also have a reputation for being complicated.

The good news is that learning how to create a pivot table in Excel is much easier than you may believe.

We’re going to walk you through the process of creating a pivot table and show you just how simple it is. First, though, let’s take a step back and make sure you understand exactly what a pivot table is, and why you might need to use one.

What is a pivot table?
What are pivot tables used for?
How to Create a Pivot Table
Pivot Table Examples

In other words, pivot tables extract meaning from that seemingly endless jumble of numbers on your screen. And more specifically, it lets you group your data in different ways so you can draw helpful conclusions more easily.

The «pivot» part of a pivot table stems from the fact that you can rotate (or pivot) the data in the table to view it from a different perspective. To be clear, you’re not adding to, subtracting from, or otherwise changing your data when you make a pivot. Instead, you’re simply reorganizing the data so you can reveal useful information.

What are pivot tables used for?

If you’re still feeling a bit confused about what pivot tables actually do, don’t worry. This is one of those technologies that are much easier to understand once you’ve seen it in action.

The purpose of pivot tables is to offer user-friendly ways to quickly summarize large amounts of data. They can be used to better understand, display, and analyze numerical data in detail.

With this information, you can help identify and answer unanticipated questions surrounding the data.

Here are seven hypothetical scenarios where a pivot table could be helpful.

1. Comparing Sales Totals of Different Products

Let’s say you have a worksheet that contains monthly sales data for three different products — product 1, product 2, and product 3. You want to figure out which of the three has been generating the most revenue.

One way would be to look through the worksheet and manually add the corresponding sales figure to a running total every time product 1 appears. The same process can then be done for product 2, and product 3 until you have totals for all of them. Piece of cake, right?

Imagine, now, that your monthly sales worksheet has thousands upon thousands of rows. Manually sorting through each necessary piece of data could literally take a lifetime.

With pivot tables, you can automatically aggregate all of the sales figures for product 1, product 2, and product 3 — and calculate their respective sums — in less than a minute.

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2. Showing Product Sales as Percentages of Total Sales

Pivot tables inherently show the totals of each row or column when created. That’s not the only figure you can automatically produce, however.

Let’s say you entered quarterly sales numbers for three separate products into an Excel sheet and turned this data into a pivot table. The pivot table automatically gives you three totals at the bottom of each column — having added up each product’s quarterly sales.

But what if you wanted to find the percentage these product sales contributed to all company sales, rather than just those products’ sales totals?

With a pivot table, instead of just the column total, you can configure each column to give you the column’s percentage of all three column totals.

Let’s say three products totaled $200,000 in sales. The first product made $45,000, you can edit a pivot table to instead say this product contributed 22.5% of all company sales.

To show product sales as percentages of total sales in a pivot table, simply right-click the cell carrying a sales total and select Show Values As > % of Grand Total.

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3. Combining Duplicate Data

In this scenario, you’ve just completed a blog redesign and had to update many URLs. Unfortunately, your blog reporting software didn’t handle the change well and split the «view» metrics for single posts between two different URLs.

In your spreadsheet, you now have two separate instances of each individual blog post. To get accurate data, you need to combine the view totals for each of these duplicates.

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Instead of having to manually search for and combine all the metrics from the duplicates, you can summarize your data (via pivot table) by blog post title.

Voilà, the view metrics from those duplicate posts will be aggregated automatically.

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4. Getting an Employee Headcount for Separate Departments

Pivot tables are helpful for automatically calculating things that you can’t easily find in a basic Excel table. One of those things is counting rows that all have something in common.

For instance, let’s say you have a list of employees in an Excel sheet. Next to the employees’ names are the respective departments they belong to. You can create a pivot table from this data that shows you each department’s name and the number of employees that belong to those departments.

The pivot table’s automated functions effectively eliminate your task of sorting the Excel sheet by department name and counting each row manually.

5. Adding Default Values to Empty Cells

Not every dataset you enter into Excel will populate every cell. If you’re waiting for new data to come in, you might have lots of empty cells that look confusing or need further explanation.

That’s where pivot tables come in.

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You can easily customize a pivot table to fill empty cells with a default value, such as $0, or TBD (for «to be determined»). For large data tables, being able to tag these cells quickly is a valuable feature when many people are reviewing the same sheet.

To automatically format the empty cells of your pivot table, right-click your table and click PivotTable Options.

In the window that appears, check the box labeled Empty Cells As and enter what you’d like displayed when a cell has no other value.

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1. Enter your data into a range of rows and columns.
2. Sort your data by a specific attribute.
3. Highlight your cells to create your pivot table.
4. Drag and drop a field into the «Row Labels» area.
5. Drag and drop a field into the «Values» area.
6. Fine-tune your calculations.

Now that you have a better sense of what pivot tables can be used for, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of how to actually create one.

Step 1. Enter your data into a range of rows and columns.

Every pivot table in Excel starts with a basic Excel table, where all your data is housed. To create this table, simply enter your values into a specific set of rows and columns. Use the topmost row or the topmost column to categorize your values by what they represent.

For example, to create an Excel table of blog post performance data, you might have:

• A column listing each «Top Pages.»
• A column listing each URL’s «Clicks.»
• A column listing each post’s «Impressions.»

We’ll be using that example in the steps that follow.

Step 2. Sort your data by a specific attribute.

Once you’ve entered all your data into your Excel sheet, you’ll want to sort your data by attribute. This will make your information easier to manage once it becomes a pivot table.

To sort your data, click the Data tab in the top navigation bar and select the Sort icon underneath it. In the window that appears, you can sort your data by any column you want and in any order.

For example, to sort your Excel sheet by «Views to Date,» select this column title under Column and then select whether you want to order your posts from smallest to largest, or from largest to smallest.

Select OK on the bottom-right of the Sort window.

Now, you’ve successfully reordered each row of your Excel sheet by the number of views each blog post has received.

Step 3. Highlight your cells to create your pivot table.

Once you’ve entered and sorted your data, highlight the cells you’d like to summarize in a pivot table. Click Insert along the top navigation, and select the PivotTable icon.

You can also click anywhere in your worksheet, select «PivotTable,» and manually enter the range of cells you’d like included in the PivotTable.

This opens an options box. Here you can select whether or not to launch this pivot table in a new worksheet or keep it in the existing worksheet, in addition to setting your cell range.

If you open a new sheet, you can navigate to and away from it at the bottom of your Excel workbook. Once you’ve chosen, click OK.

Alternatively, you can highlight your cells, select Recommended PivotTables to the right of the PivotTable icon, and open a pivot table with pre-set suggestions for how to organize each row and column.

Note: If using an earlier version of Excel, «PivotTables» may be under Tables or Data along the top navigation, rather than «Insert.» In Google Sheets, you can create pivot tables from the Data dropdown along the top navigation.

Step 4. Drag and drop a field into the «Row Labels» area.

After you’ve completed Step 3, Excel will create a blank pivot table for you.

Your next step is to drag and drop a field — labeled according to the names of the columns in your spreadsheet — into the Row Labels area. This will determine what unique identifier the pivot table will organize your data by.

For example, let’s say you want to organize a bunch of blogging data by post title. To do that, you’d simply click and drag the “Top pages” field to the «Row Labels» area.

Note: Your pivot table may look different depending on which version of Excel you’re working with. However, the general principles remain the same.

Step 5. Drag and drop a field into the «Values» area.

Once you’ve established how you’re going to organize your data, your next step is to add in some values by dragging a field into the Values area.

Sticking with the blogging data example, let’s say you want to summarize blog post views by title. To do this, you’d simply drag the «Views» field into the Values area.

Step 6. Fine-tune your calculations.

The sum of a particular value will be calculated by default, but you can easily change this to something like average, maximum, or minimum depending on what you want to calculate.

On a Mac, you can do this by clicking on the small i next to a value in the «Values» area, selecting the option you want, and clicking «OK.» Once you’ve made your selection, your pivot table will be updated accordingly.

If you’re using a PC, you’ll need to click on the small upside-down triangle next to your value and select Value Field Settings to access the menu.

When you’ve categorized your data to your liking, save your work and use it as you please.

Pivot Table Examples

From managing money to keeping tabs on your marketing effort, pivot tables can help you keep track of important data. The possibilities are endless!

See three pivot table examples below to keep you inspired.

1. Creating a PTO Summary and Tracker

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If you’re in HR, running a business, or leading a small team, managing employees’ vacations is essential. This pivot allows you to seamlessly track this data.

All you need to do is import your employee’s identification data along with the following data:

• Sick time.
• Hours of PTO.
• Company holidays.
• Overtime hours.
• Employee’s regular number of hours.

From there, you can sort your pivot table by any of these categories.

2. Building a Budget

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Whether you’re running a project or just managing your own money, pivot tables are an excellent tool for tracking spend.

The simplest budget just requires the following categories:

• Date of transaction
• Withdrawal/Expenses
• Deposit/Income
• Description
• Any overarching categories (like paid ads or contractor fees)

With this information, you can see your biggest expenses and brainstorm ways to save.

3. Tracking Your Campaign Performance

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Pivot tables can help your team assess the performance of your marketing campaigns.

In this example, campaign performance is split by region. You can easily which country had the highest conversions during different campaigns.

This can help you identify tactics that perform well in each region and where advertisements need to be changed.

Digging Deeper With Pivot Tables

You’ve now learned the basics of pivot table creation in Excel. With this understanding, you can figure out what you need from your pivot table and find the solutions you’re looking for.

For example, you may notice that the data in your pivot table isn’t sorted the way you’d like. If this is the case, Excel’s Sort function can help you out. Alternatively, you may need to incorporate data from another source into your reporting, in which case the VLOOKUP function could come in handy.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in December 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.