From the course: Excel: PivotTables for Beginners (2018)
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Prepare your data - Microsoft Excel Tutorial
From the course: Excel: PivotTables for Beginners (2018)
Prepare your data
- [Instructor] First things first, before you make a pivot table you have to be sure your data is ready. It's kind of like stretching before exercising or tuning a guitar before playing it. It's a step that really shouldn't be skipped because if you do you might run into some challenges later. First, make sure your columns are named at the top, and this may sound really obvious but if they have good descriptive names they're going to be easier to work with later. This one here it looks like it is amount, so we might as well just spell it out and rename it amount. And we also have a blank column here and some blank rows. This can be a challenge for pivot tables because pivot tables really need to know exactly where your data starts and ends without any funny blanks in between. So, I'm going to click this column, right click delete, and then I'm going to click this row, hold down the control key, and then select those blank rows, right click delete again. And now we've got a pretty good…
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