What is a Pivot Table?

(I would highly recommend that you go over the tutorial videos in the order they appear - starting from the top downwards, because every video is advancing a step further the concept taught in the former one).

The “Pivot table” might be the most powerful and efficient feature of Microsoft Excel 2007.

With it you can summarize a table’s data by its different fields (the table’s columns), and to easily make all the desired intersections between them.

For example, if you are given a table of company employees with the following fields:

- Employee name
- Department
- Car ownership
- Salary
- Number of monthly working hours

You can easily use a pivot table to retrieve the following information:
- Count the total number of employees in every department.
- Count the total number of employees with and without a car.
- The average salary of employees with a car, and of employees without a car.
- The average salary of employees with a car and without a car, inside every department.
- The highest number of monthly working hours for every department.
…and the combinations are endless.

You can find such examples in the videos presented above.

After creating the pivot table report, you can format it, sort it, group dates and numerical ranges together, filter items outside, switch between rows and columns, apply different statistical functions to the data (sum, count, average etc.), change and refresh the original data and see how it is reflected on the report, create a chart from it …and this list can go on…