Excel Pivot Tables: A Visual Introduction For Beginners

by Scott Hartshorn

Excel Pivot Tables – What’s The Big Deal?

Pivot tables are widely regarded as one of the most powerful features in Excel.  But why is that?  What makes them so useful?  Simply put, if you don’t have specialized software for your data analysis, Excel Pivot Tables are one of the most versatile and quick ways to interrogate your data.  You can manipulate and understand large quantities of data much faster than if you were trying to extract that information from a bunch of functions in cells. The power of pivot tables to show you summations, counts, percentages and other quantities is very useful in a number of business or scientific settings.

If you are looking for a guide to quickly get you started using pivot tables, then this is a good book for you.

A Visual Guide To Pivot Tables

This book walks through how to get started with Pivot Tables.   It goes step by step in how to set up pivot tables and manipulate the data, with screen shots of each step, including what needs to be clicked to manipulate the pivot table, and what the result is.

Real Life Data – With The Excel File Available

Most of this book is an extended example working with real life data.  It is amazing how quickly pivot tables can take over 70,000 rows of data from dozens of different groups and make all that data easy to understand and to tell a story.   If you want to work the examples along with the book, the Excel file that they all came from is linked and can be downloaded for free.

What Functions Are In The Book

This book is focused on the most important features of Pivot Tables, but it doesn’t deep dive into the details of every single different thing that can be done with them.  Like many things in Excel, there dozens and hundreds of little tips and tricks that you can do to pivot tables for specialized circumstances.  This book doesn’t go over all of those because it is intended to be a quick read that can get you going with pivot tables right away, instead of laboring through a long tome of every single feature. 

This book does cover the most useful and common ways that pivot tables are used, including

How to create pivot tables Different ways that they can be set up in rows, columns or tables How to show the values in the pivot tables as counts, summations, products, percentages or other useful values
How to filter and sort pivot tables How to format them And a few other tips and tricks.

56 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 11, 2016

Reviews

[Steven Sanderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quick and Easy

I think this would be a good book for someone who is unfamiliar with pivot tables, it provides a real life and easy to follow example.