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Pivot Tables Excel

This document is a lab guide for learning about Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts in Excel. It covers the creation of Pivot Tables, updating values, using filters, adjusting value field settings, and creating Pivot Charts. The exercises encourage hands-on practice with data manipulation to derive meaningful insights from the provided Excel sheet.

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lamyaebenhaddou8
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3 views8 pages

Pivot Tables Excel

This document is a lab guide for learning about Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts in Excel. It covers the creation of Pivot Tables, updating values, using filters, adjusting value field settings, and creating Pivot Charts. The exercises encourage hands-on practice with data manipulation to derive meaningful insights from the provided Excel sheet.

Uploaded by

lamyaebenhaddou8
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Lab 4: Pivot Tables in Excel

In today’s lab we will learn:

• What are Pivot Tables and why we need them

• How to create Pivot Tables

• How do we create different reports using Filters and Value Field Settings

• How to update values in a Pivot Table

• How to create Pivot Charts


Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts
Pivot Tables are an advanced and very useful feature in Excel. The purpose of
this exercise is to teach you this feature in particular, and to let you play with
Excel in a way that gives you a good feel for it.

Download the Excel sheet provided for you for this lab and look at it.

Something to think about: The data is all there,


but we may have to manipulate it a lot to see
meaningful information. For example, if you
want to see which product overall sold the
most (across all branches). Or if you want the
sales figures totaled by month. How would you
obtain this information? Formulas, sorting and
filtering will help here, but you can already see
that it will be quite tedious to change back and
forth between different groupings of data
(group by month, group by product type, etc).
Exercise 1: Creating Pivot Tables
 Open your Excel file, go to Insert
tab and click on PivotTable (left
most button in the Insert tab).

 When the “Create Pivot Table”


dialog box comes up, your full data
should be selected. If it is not
selected, select the full cell range of
your data. Then hit “OK”.

 These features will show up in


the view.

 Go ahead and select “Store


Location” and “Quantity sold” in
the PivotTable Field List and see
what kind of summarized table is
created.
Exercise 2: Playing around with Pivot Tables
 Play around with selecting different fields in the PivotTable Field List and see how it
affects the table that gets created. Play around enough with selecting and unselecting
different fields until you get a good idea of this functionality.

 Now, select “Store Location”, “Month” and “Quantity Sold”, and also drag “Month”
into the Column Labels box.
Exercise 3: Updating values in a Pivot Table
 Go ahead and change one of the quantities sold value in your spreadsheet. You will
see that the PivotTable didn’t change any values inside it (it didn’t update).

 You have to tell the PivotTable to refresh itself. To do that you click anywhere in the
PivotTable, and you will see a PivotTable Tools tab come up at the top. In that tab is a
“Refresh” button. Click on it to update the PivotTable.

 You can play more by changing one of the products to another (for example, change
one of the “bed” to a “desk”) and then do the refresh to see the PivotTable get updated
accordingly.

 Remove “Month” from Column Labels box and put “Product”


there and see what kind of summary the table creates.

 Similarly, play around with putting some fields in the Row


Labels box and see what are the results.
Exercise 4: Filters in Pivot Tables
 Select “Store Location” and “Quantity sold” in the PivotTable Field list, and drag the
“Month” field into the “Report Filter” box. You will see a Month bar with filter icon
appear at the top of the PivotTable. Click the filter icon there and you can control which
months should be included in the summary table.

 Also there is a little arrow button next to the Row Labels column in the PivotTable.
Click on it to control which cities should be selected for the report.

 Play around with choosing a different filter (such as “Product”).


Exercise 5: Value Field Settings
 Go to Value Field settings as shown in the picture
below. You will get to a dialogue box with numerical
function. “Sum” is the default function, but you can
change it to “Average” or “Min” or “Max” and see
what happens. If all months are selected then it will
give you the Min or Max quantity sold across all
months for each city (rather than the sum across all
months).

 Careful with averages in Excel: If a certain city has


only two months in the data, it will compute the
average for that city over two months, and not over 4
months. Try it and see.
Exercise 6: Pivot Charts
 The principle behind this feature is identical to PivotTables. From Insert tab, you will
choose PivotChart (same button as PivotTable, but choose the PivotChart option under
that button) and then it will give you a chart.

 You can control the variables displayed, sorted, and filtered exactly the same way you
did for PivotTables above.

 Note: If you close the PivotTable Field List


window and want it again, right click on your Pivot
Table, and then choose the Show Field List option in
the menu.

 Note: To delete your PivotTable, click on the


PivotTable, then go to Select button in the
PivotTable Tools tab, and choose Entire PivotTable.
This will select your whole PivotTable and then you
can hit the delete button the on the keyboard.

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