Setting Up and Using Pivot Tables in Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Office has a lot of highly functional tools including the Microsoft Word and Excel. There are different features of these effective and powerful tools, making it a must for most businesses for their employees to be knowledgeable in Microsoft Excel and its advanced features. General and basic features can be easily learned through the Internet. However, there are also intermediate and advanced Excel functionalities such as pivot tables that are useful for making reporting easy. What are these tables anyway? This is an advanced feature helping individuals manage data and numeric values easily. Data can be arranged in whichever way you prefer it to be.
Unfortunately, a lot of people try to shy away from these pivot tables because these seem too complicated. But in general, manipulating these types of Excel features can be easily learned and applied. You can easily play around the function and find out which setting works best for you. If you’re not happy with the results or with your table, you can easily perform the “undo” function and conduct another test. As long as you keep your table and format intact, everything will work out fine.
But before you try and explore more about these tables, you need to create a spreadsheet to use. First off, create a new spreadsheet and choose “Pivot Table” from the “Data” menu. From there, you can customize your labels or headers. For instance, add “Name”, “Product”, “Amount” and “Date” on these headers. You can change it and add more labels anytime. Fill up the information such as Stella, Bag, 1000, 1/1/2012. As soon as you’ve filled up the rows and columns with data and information, you can go to the “Pivot Table” from the menu and choose the actions that you want to be performed. You can add the total amount and get the percentage of these data, or you can sort these names and find out how many names are similar. If you want to check the total amount of sales that you’ve obtained from a specific period of time, you can easily obtain these results without having to manually compute these numeric values from your spreadsheet. Again, choose the function and / or the cells that you want to sort, go to the menu and from the drop down menu, choose the labels that say date and products. This way, you’ll be able to sort these types of information and have all the details you need within a couple of minutes. All these things can be easily done through the use of Microsoft Excel’s pivot tables.
Pivot tables can be used especially if you have a large list or database of products. This way, you don’t have to go through your list and check them one by one. All that it takes is being knowledgeable and tasks that could take you 8 days to complete can be done in a couple of hours or even less.
Learn what pivot tables are and start being on top of others who have knowledge in Microsoft Excel. More companies prefer hiring people who have advanced knowledge in Microsoft Excel, and if you’re anticipating for a promotion, you may even get it simply studying more about these pivottables.
