What are Pivot Tables in Microsoft Excel? First of all, let’s discuss tables. In Excel, a table is a set of data that is organized into rows and columns. For example, a business may have a table listing the products they have in inventory, or a list of current employees. A common example is the sales report. Pivot tables become important when tables get large and you have questions concerning the data, such as which product sold the most, or what product category sold the most. We can get into a lot of manual sorting and filtering to answer these and other questions, but pivot tables make answering these questions a lot easier and faster. Pivot tables allow you to easily organize, filter, summarize, and analyze raw data. A pivot table is like a graphical interface to the creation of SQL select queries.

YouTube Tutorials

Excel Pivot Tables EXPLAINED in 10 Minutes (Productivity tips included!) is a good introduction video by Leila Gharani. It’s about 13 minutes long and has about 2.5 million views. Here are a few pointers from this video. First, make sure your data structure is in a good format. Don’t create a pivot table if the data is not yet in a good format. Next, transform your data into a table, if you have not already done so. Give your table a name. Now create your pivot table by placing your cursor inside the table, Insert, Pivot Table.

Thankfully Leila has created a follow-up video to this one called Advanced Pivot Table Techniques (to achieve more in Excel). Here is the list of tips in this video: Create a Pivot table, Adjust Pivot table Field List Settings, Create Multiple Pivot Reports With 1 Click, Drill Down in Pivot tables For Details, Add Data Bars to Pivot Tables, Create Calculated Fields, Calculate the Difference Between Columns, Smart Custom Number Formatting, Create Your Own Custom Groupings, How to Group Date Fields, and Add A Timeline to Your Pivot Table.

Introduction to Pivot Tables, Charts, and Dashboards in Excel (Part 1). This is a good introduction to Pivot Tables. It’s only about 14 minutes long. It is from Jon at Excel Campus. It has been viewed over 12 million times. It’s an older video from 2015, but gives us a good introduction. You can download the Excel file and follow along yourself provided that you give your email address.

Pivot Table with Progress Chart and Dashboard. This video is very popular with over 2 million views. It is just over 28 minutes long.