About this lesson
Pivot Tables open up your world to quickly summarize data and build solutions that others can explore.
Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ Excel workbooks from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.What is a PivotTable - and why do you care?.xlsx
29.1 MB What is a PivotTable - and why do you care? - Completed.xlsx
What IS a PivotTable (and why do you care?)
Where/when to use the technique
When you want to open up your world to quickly summarize data and build solutions that others can explore.
Ease of creation and use
- Only a few clicks to create
- Drag and drop fields makes it easy to set up/modify views
- Promotes user interactivity
The Rubik’s cube of data
- Allows quick “pivoting” or re-arrangement of fields to show data in different ways
- Allows full user interactivity with the data
- Generates summaries of numbers without writing any formulas
- Refined algorithms make calculation speed virtually instant
- Above holds true whether used to summarize 30 or 3,000,000 records
- Allows using data sets with more than 1M rows or 16K columns (more rows/columns than exist in the Excel grid)
- Solutions can be developed once and refreshed many times with just a right click
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