From the course: Excel: PivotTables for Beginners (2018)

What is a PivotTable? - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Excel: PivotTables for Beginners (2018)

Start my 1-month free trial

What is a PivotTable?

“

- [Instructor] Just what is a pivot table? A pivot table is an incredibly powerful analysis feature in Excel that lets you summarize a bunch of data in just a few clicks. Basically, they let you go from something like this, which is a massive amount of data, to something like this, where you've got your data and then you've got your pivot table, which summarizes the data and if you look at this pivot table closely, it looks like it's almost collating the transactions for each of these people. Now this is a fairly simple example of a pivot table. Here's a more complex pivot table and in this case, the pivot table summarizes by the type of purchase and then it divides it up by who spent what. Your pivot tables don't necessarily have to be this complicated when starting out. But just know that this kind of thing is possible to do. And you might have also heard the term pivot chart. Here's an example of one of those. A pivot chart just visualizes the data. And in this case it's a bar chart. And the underlying data for that chart is, you guessed it, a pivot table. Once you get the basic fundamentals of pivot tables, pivot charts are pretty easy to use. We are not going to cover pivot charts in this course, but there are a slew of other videos on the site that can explain how to make them. Once you get the hang of pivot tables, getting insights and answers is really easy and once you grasp the fundamentals, you'll be the envy in the office.

Contents