Mastering Pivot Tables
A Pivot Table is what I call Excel’s special tool for analyzing large datasets. It allows you to create meaningful summary reports from large tables. Imagine you have a table of records that spans thousands of rows, and you need to create an insightful report from this table. Usually, a meaningful report will be one that won’t have the same thousands of rows. Rather, it will be a report that is a summary of that large table. Also, it is impossible to fit a chart on a thousand-row table. However, the summary table created via a Pivot Table can be plotted on a chart. Thus, the two major components of a dashboard, aggregated values and charts, are easily created with a Pivot Table.
We will attempt to use a Pivot Table to create a sales report from a sales orders table. You can access the practice file, AdventureWorks -Sales SalesOrderHeader.xlsx, in the companion folder. It holds over 30,000 records of sales spanning four years for Adventure Works...
