- [Instructor] Let's talk about how to create
high-level summaries with your project data.
Now, what do I mean by that?
Well, if we look at this data set here,
I see under the Assigned To
that Bob is repeated multiple times.
But I really don't have a high-level overview
of what Bob is overseeing
or how much money has been spent by him year-to-date.
So how could I find that out?
Well, I can use a great feature called a PivotTable.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to put my cursor anywhere
inside this table.
I'm going to click on Okay,
and them I'm going to click PivotTable.
At this point in time, it's going to ask:
Do I want to create a new worksheet?
I'm going to say yes.
Now, an easy way to remember this is the joke.
A PivotTable walks into a bar and the bartender says,
"Hey, do you want to start a new tab?"
So now that I have started a new PivotTable,
it's going to create a new sheet for me.
And PivotTables are really interesting.
So what they do is they take repeating values
and they collapse them into one.
Let's see that in action.
First thing I'm going to do is I'm going to take Description
and drop that into the rows.
So here are all the different project descriptions
that we have available.
The next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to take Assigned To
and drop that in the columns.
Now, you see there's only three items here,
but if I go back to the original data set,
there's more than three items.
So basically, what a PivotTables does is
it uniquifies the list.
Now, because it collapsed these down
and we only have one item for each of them,
we have to do something with the associated data.
Well, that's what happens in the Values bucket over here.
So whenever we drop something in, it aggregates it.
So in this case, if Bob had repeating values,
it's going to sum it up into one number to correspond
to that one entry for Bob.
So let's see that in action.
I'm going to click YTD Spend and drop that right here.
So now we can see across multiple projects,
this is how much Bob has spent.
Now, one thing I like to do is,
once I've dropped these values in,
I like to format them just to make them look
a little bit better.
And one other thing I really enjoy doing
with a PivotTable is that you can also use slicers.
So you can put your cursor anywhere inside here,
and you can go to PivotTable Analyze
and click Insert Slicer.
Now, slicers work the best with categorical data.
So let's click Status.
That's terrific categorical data.
And now what we can do is,
we can actually slice on these values
and see our high-level summary update.
Well, now that you know how to create high-level summaries
with PivotTables, in the next movie,
we're going to talk about how to create descriptive statistics
so that we can understand
if our projects are on track or not.