Pivot table help for beginners (Excel 2000 SR1a)

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I’ve seen pivot tables mentioned here numerous times, yet this is one feature of Excel that I havn’t delved into as of yet… I’m thinking that once I got a bit of a start into them that I could make them work for me. Is there a good resource available somewhere (book, site, etc.) that would serve as a decent beginner’s tutorial?

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David, I don’t know of any good book, specifically for pivot tables — have been looking for one myself. I did a quick search on Google and got over 7000 hits on the expression “pivot table”. That might be a place to start. I have found that most books on Excel have a small worked example on them, but I have learned the little I know from just playing around with data tables. I hope maybe that someone will write a book, because from the little bit I have seen, it is one of the most powerfule aspects of analysis in Excel. I have attached an example that may help. If I find anything else, I will definitely share through this thread.

Ron M

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Hi David,
At the risk of appearing biased, Woody’s SE Using Office 2000 has a decent introduction to pivot tables, or I have a book called Excel Expert Solutions by Brian Underdahl that’s pretty good (mine is based on Excel7 but there may be a more recent version)
Hope that helps.

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> At the risk of appearing biased…

No need for silly caveats here! If you believe in a product, and you think it may be a good fit for someone else’s needs, you should have no reservation against recommending it — unless, of course, you receive a commission (or other direct benefit) for selling it. And if you were really intent on selling it, you would have hyperlinked the title to an order page to make buying it easier.

Besides, I was drawn to the Lounge after seeing/hearing recommendations of “Woodyswatch” from distinctly arms-length sources — including a couple of potential competitors to the book you mentioned. If Woody’s competitors are recommending Woodys as a reference/resource site, it definately makes me think there’s something to your recommendation!

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Edited by gwhitfield on 15-Nov-01 06:46.

Chip Pearson’s site has a good intro to pivot tables: http://www.cpearson.com/excel/pivots.htm. You could also look at John Walkenbach’s site or his Excel 2000 Bible.

Graeme

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I am turning away from pivot tables at the moment. I had a large workbook that included 5 pivot tables. It was 11.5 megs. I removed the pivot tables replacing them with countif formulae together with various array formulae and reduced the overall size to 4.5 megs. I think that this should be an improvement.
Do you need pivot tables?
Regards

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Do I need pivot tables? I don’t know yet. For now, I’m interested in what they are and how they can be utilized, and then I’ll see how well they may fit into my work. I use countifs and sumifs and matches and lookups and such right now (though nothing with arrays either). For hardcore data analysis I pull the data into Access and build queries. After looking at the ‘Introduction to Pivot Tables’ that GraemH’s post points to, it looks like the pivot table might fill an ‘intermediate’ role or when I just need some quick and dirty analysis.

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When creating pivot tables, make sure you uncheck the Save Data with Table Layout in the Options section. If the box is checked, that means it will save your data with EACH pivot table — meaning your spreadsheet was “duplicated” 5 times! When you uncheck the box it will always refer back to your original data and save you precious memory!

Another box I always uncheck is the AutoFormat Table option. If you leave it checked and have multiple pivot tables on one spreadsheet, it will resize the columns to fit the last pivot table you refreshed, which can be a big pain depending on what you’re doing.

Don’t give up on pivot tables — they make life very easy (esp. by saving time) once you get to know them!

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Thanks for the advice I’ll check it out. It could save some heartache.

Rgds

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