The Value of Pivot Tables

 

As a freelance trainer I often find delegates are “frightened” of pivot tables.  All those buttons and new terminology.  They incorrectly think that using AutoFilter will give them equally effective results.  As a freelancer I used to shy away from them too.  Far too complicated.  That is until whilst surfing on the net one day I came across a fantastically easy example.  So now I always start with a very simplistic example.  Take a list of invoices with date of invoice, company and amount paid.  There are over 600 lines of data but only 8 clients.  From this we create a pivot table that gives the total revenue for each company.  600 lines whittled down to 8 rows of data.  Wow!  The delegate thinks – Cool – this is easy and indeed it is.  So we play with that for a bit and then I say to them “Wouldn’t it be great if we could find out the revenue per month?”  “Yes” they say.  So then I get them to add the Date field and group by month on it.  They are then sold.  Of course you can do so much more but first you have to take away the fear.  For further help go to www.catraining.net