- [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 of data here.
It's going to leave all of 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.
This contains all of our order information.
For a pivot table to work,
the first thing that has to happen is you need to make sure
you don't have any empty rows or columns.
Also, your Excel file needs headers, like these here.
To get started, change to the insert ribbon tab,
and click pivot table on the left hand side.
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 on a new file,
remember, just in a new tab.
We'll click OK, and as you can see,
it's created that brand new tab for me.
My original data is still here,
perfectly intact on this sheet.
But now we can start building our pivot table.
The key data is here on the right.
Here's all of our column headers.
Below here we can specify our rows, our columns,
our values that we want to summarize.
And we can even put in a filter if we want to.
And this is how pivot tables are really powerful.
All we need to do is drag and drop these column headers,
and we can rearrange them and move them around
and move them in and out.
Especially if something doesn't give you the desired results
that you want 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 see my product category field,
and I'm going to drag that into rows.
Instantly, on the left hand side,
here's all of the categories that I have.
Next, I want to see the quantity of units
that I sold of each one.
So I'll take this quantity field and drag it into values.
So right away, we're seeing a sum
of all the quantities of units sold.
And it's pulling all of that data from here.
But maybe I want to qualify that data.
Where's it coming from? Where's it selling?
We can do that by dragging the data into columns.
For example, what 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, these are the units sold,
and here's the grand total.
Notice up here where it says column labels,
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,
I'll click on report layout.
I can choose to show it in outline form.
And for whatever reason, this fixes it.
So now you can see the field that you've selected here.
Here 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.
Now it's going to disappear and I can put something else in.
This is going to take up a lot of room,
but you 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.
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 rows.
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 of the report.
This is how pivot reports are great.
At any time, you can change this data.
You can move things around.
You can swap between columns and rows,
anything that's going to give you the big picture
of what's going on with your data.
From here, you could 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, if you're just playing around
learning how pivot tables work, that's great.
At any time, you can always right click
and just delete this worksheet.
Don't forget, your data is still perfectly intact here.
It hasn't been touched.