PivotTables enable you to extract meaning from large amounts of data. This description is deceptively simple because in fact PivotTables are powerful and sophisticated tools that enable you to do things that would be impossible or difficult to do any other way. A PivotTable enables you to take what seems to be an indecipherable mass of facts and extract any trends and patterns buried in the data. You can organize and summarize your data, perform comparisons, and extract meaningful information that can be
invaluable to you and your organization. A PivotTable can work with data that is located in an Excel workbook and also with data from an external database. This is an important factor because it enables you to analyze data sets that are much too large to be contained in a
workbook. Now that Excel 2007 is here, this point seems less important than in the past.
With a capability of one million rows, it seems probable that most data sets will fit into a workbook easily. A more compelling reason to work with an external database is that it ensures data integrity throughout an organization—not to mention that it is easier than
importing the data into Excel just to create a PivotTable.
Why the term pivot? It comes from an analogy between the way PivotTables work and the way you investigate a physical object. Imagine that you have been handed a complex device and asked to figure out what it does. You don’t just look at it from one angle; rather you turn it in your hands, examining it from all possible perspectives to be sure you do not miss any important clues. PivotTables work the same way, enabling you to turn or pivot the
raw data and examine it from various perspectives to extract the information you need.
Then you also have the option of creating a PivotChart, a graphical representation of the information in a PivotTable.
Suppose you work for a chain of sporting-goods stores. Every day you receive a report from each store that includes complete details on that day’s activities, such as number of customers each hour, sales in each of 30 categories, items returned for refund or exchange,
and number of employees on duty at different times of the day. It won’t be long before your Excel workbook is chock-full of this raw data, but what good does it do you? You could stare at this information for hours without gaining any useful insights from it. But with a PivotTable you can quickly and easily answer the following types of questions:
• Which days of the week show the highest sales?
• Which categories of merchandise sell best at different times of the year?
• Are more employees scheduled to work during periods of the highest customer load?
• Do certain categories of merchandise suffer from unusually high rates of return or exchange?
These are the kinds of questions that a business needs to answer in order to operate efficiently. These are also the kinds of questions that PivotTables are designed to answer. The same kinds of analysis are appropriate for almost any kind of data you can imagine, from
political surveys to weather patterns, from quality control in a manufacturing plant to test scores in a high school. That’s the beauty of PivotTables—they are powerful and flexible.
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