Excel Pivot Tables | A Quick Start Guide

Explore a fictitious Wonder Paw's data set to understand order details, marketing channels, product categories, regions, and dates, building intuition for using pivot tables to analyze sales and profit.

Explore pivot tables as a display or layout of your data, twist, rotate, and swivel fields to create different layouts for analysis.

Discover how to build multi-field pivot tables by dragging multiple fields into rows and columns, using product category, subcategory, region, marketing channel, state, and sales amount.

Learn to sort pivot tables by alphabetizing row labels, use A to Z or Z to A, and manually drag fields to establish the desired hierarchy.

Explore how to filter pivot tables in Excel using standard filters and value filters, including top 10 and between 500 and 700, with multi-field filters to reveal targeted data.

Explore how pivot tables recognize and group dates, and customize display by months, quarters, and years using expand/collapse and group options.

Apply pivot table formatting using design tab styles or manual options from the home tab, including colors, fonts, and currency formats, and explore conditional formatting as a familiar option.

Explore pivot table layouts in Excel, and adjust grand totals and subtotals from the design tab. Compare compact, outline, and tabular layouts, learn how subtitles and repeat items affect readability.

Learn to change pivot table calculations via value field settings, displaying average, max, and min of the sales amount.

Explore multifield calculations in pivot tables by adding multiple fields to the value section, including sales amount and profit, and using average. Duplicate fields to show multiple calculations.

Master how to create and edit calculated fields in Excel pivot tables, naming the field and building simple tax formulas from existing data.

Learn how to display data as percent of grand total in pivot tables, by using value field settings and the show values as option to show a percentage breakdown.

Create a new pivot table, drag marketing channel, subchannel, and profit, switch to tabular form, and apply show values as percent of column total to show each column’s share.

Learn to show values as percent of parent total in Excel pivot tables by using a base field (marketing channel), duplicating the profit field, and interpreting subtotals.

Apply the rank function in pivot tables to rank sales amounts from largest to smallest, identify top sellers by product subcategory, and rename the resulting field for clarity.

Learn to use multiple slicers in an Excel pivot table to filter data across marketing channel and region, with practical steps to insert, arrange, and clear filters.

Explore how to use the timeline feature with pivot tables in Excel to filter by order date, adjust by months or years, and customize styles.

Learn how to connect multiple slicers to multiple pivot tables, synchronize filters across worksheets, and use report connections to control two pivot tables with shared slicers.

Click the chart to access the design and format tabs, apply built-in styles and colors, and use right-click to explore elements and hide field buttons for a cleaner pivot chart.

Clear pivot table fields by unchecking items or dragging them to the no man's land area, and reset the table with the Analyze tab’s clear all.

Master how to reveal the missing field list in pivot tables by returning to the pivot area and using the analyzed tab to display the field list.

Learn to handle errors in Excel pivot tables by adjusting options to show no data for empty cells and replacing errors with no value, then set value fields to sum.

Explore how to use the GETPIVOTDATA function to pull pivot table values, perform additions, and build an if statement with the wizard guiding syntax.

Adopt pivot tables by emphasizing principles versus techniques, interpret client needs, and explore data to tailor displays such as region, subchannel, product category, and quarterly sales.