Goodwill Community Foundation creating
opportunities for a better life one of
the best things about Excel is the fact
that a single worksheet can hold so much
information in fact you could fill
billions of cells if you needed that
much room a file with that much data
could get pretty overwhelming but
there's a feature called pivot tables
that can help pivot tables let you
summarize and manipulate your data
without actually changing anything in
the worksheet let's take a look at how
they work in this example I have some
company sales data with columns for the
salesperson region account order amount
and month and I need to find the answer
to a very specific question what is the
amount sold by each salesperson because
each salesperson has data on more than
one row I'd normally have to add these
up in order to find the answer but a
pivot table can do this for us
automatically which will make the task
much much easier first you need to
select your data you can just click any
cell if it's formatted as a table
otherwise you need to select all the
cell's yourself and don't forget your
column headers when you're ready go to
the insert tab then click the pivot
table command you'll usually want to
place your pivot table on a new
worksheet so make sure this option is
selected then click OK and a new sheet
will appear over on the left is our
blank pivot table it's OK that there's
nothing there yet to the right is a list
of fields that have actually been pulled
from our column headers this is where we
control what is or isn't displayed in
the pivot table but before we continue
let's take another look at that question
what is the amount sold by each
salesperson
this question tells us exactly which
fields to use to find out the answer
salesperson and order amount all you
have to do is check the box next to the
field and it'll be added to one of the
areas below in this case the rows
category
another method is to drag and drop the
field into place we'll put this one
under values if we go back to the pivot
table now we can see the information we
were looking for in other words the
amount sold by each salesperson so our
question has been answered just by
choosing what fields to include one of
the best things about pivot tables is
how easy they are to modify so you can
view and analyze different things let's
say for example that you wanted to know
each person's monthly sales not just
their total sales just drag the month
field down here to columns and this will
add a column for each month in the
worksheet if we wanted to know what each
region sold we could take out the month
in salesperson fields and then drag
region down to rows so each time we
change the fields the pivot table is
just combining the source data in a
different way so we can view the
information we need and we're doing all
this without adding or changing anything
in the original worksheet you can even
experiment by dragging the fields into
different areas but some combinations
work better than others for instance if
I move order amount over to columns or
rows you can see that it doesn't really
give us any useful data since order
amount contains numerical values it
really does work best in the values area
finally if we click the arrow next to
order amount and go to value field
settings we can change the function to
something other than sum instead we
could count the number of cells
calculate the average or use any of the
other options here some of these
functions will be more useful than
others depending on your data so that's
just something to keep in mind in our
next video doing more with pivot tables
we're going to talk about report filters
we'll also take a look at slicers and
pivotcharts which can give you even more
ways to work with your pivot table
you