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Once you create a pivot table, you can quickly transform huge numbers of rows and columns into a meaningful, nicely formatted report.The following step-by-step example shows how to create a pivot table from multiple sheets in Excel Step 1: Enter the Data Or, perhaps we only want to see sales for the 5 best selling products?Ī pivot table makes answering these questions easy.Ī pivot table is a tool that allows you to explore large sets of data interactively. What are total sales by Product? Or, product sales by state? Or product sales by year?
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With just one click, we can instantly subtotal by customer. Notice the total matches the number we just checked manually.īuilding a pivot table is the process of answering questions you have about the data.įor example, what are total sales by customer? On the pivot table sheet, we see a simple pivot table that currently shows only the total of all sales. If we select column I, and check the Status Bar, we can see the total is over $278 thousand dollars. To make sense of the information, we need to summarize it, and a pivot table is the perfect tool.īefore we look at the pivot table, let's quickly check the total of all sales. In its current form, this data is hard to understand, because there's too much detail. You can see that there are a lot of rows, almost 3000 rows total, each representing an order for one kind of chocolate to one customer.
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This data contains columns for date, customer, city, state, region, product, category, quantity, total sales. Here we have a worksheet that contains a large set of sales data for a business that sells specialty chocolate to retailers. It's a lot harder to explain a pivot table than to show you how one works, so let's take a look. What is a pivot table? A pivot table is a special Excel tool that allows you to summarize and explore data interactively.
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