Goodwill Community Foundation creating
opportunities for a better life
grouping is one of the best ways to make
your data more
managable you can use it to show or hide
certain parts of your worksheet so you
can focus on the information you need
you can even add subtotals to summarize
or outline your data in this example I
have a list of t-shirt orders but I
don't really need to see the people's
names and payment information right now
so with my three column selected I'm
going to go to the data tab and then
click the group command now we can show
or hide the group using the button
that's attached to the bracket here
click the minus sign to hide or collapse
the data and the plus sign to show it
again to ungroup any data just make sure
it's selected then click the ungroup
command and you're all set the subtotal
command is similar to groups you can use
it to create groups automatically and
also add functions like sum count and
average to help you summarize your data
in this example I'd like to tally the
number of orders for each t-shirt size
including small medium large and
extra-large before you can add a
subtotal your data has to be sorted by
the column you plan to summarize so I've
already taken care of that all we have
to do now is click the subtotal command
and a dialog box will appear here we'll
select the column that's going to be the
basis for the subtotal in this case
t-shirt size next we'll pick the
function that we're going to be using
there are several common functions to
choose from like some average and
product but we're going to go with count
which will just count the number of
cells that contain each size if you had
numerical data you could choose some and
it would actually add the values of the
cells to create a subtotal finally check
the column where you want the subtotal
to appear then click OK now a couple of
things have happened here
each t-shirt size is now in its own
group indicated by the brackets here and
all of those groups are inside a larger
group another word for this is an
outline the other thing that's happened
is that each group has a subtotal under
it so we can see the number of shirts
that have been ordered in each size
and at the very bottom we can also see
the grand total
to make the worksheet easier to read you
can show or hide each group just like I
showed you before but when you have
groups inside of groups like we do in
this example sometimes it's easier to
view them by level just look for the
buttons to the left of your worksheet
the highest level which is 3 in this
case will show all of your data while
level 2 will hide the details of each
size leaving just the individual
subtotals finally level 1 will hide
everything so we can only see the grand
total
let's click 3 to show the entire
worksheet again to remove subtotals from
your worksheet all you have to do is
click the subtotal command then click
the button that says remove all grouping
and sub totalling can make your
worksheet less cluttered more organized
and easier to view so keep these
features in mind the next time you need
help summarizing your data
you