microsoft excel courses london - Pivot tables

Hi Chloe,

Thanks for your question.

The idea behind a pivot table is to take information that is stored in a series of columns in Excel (a list) and turn it into a summarised table format.

The pivot table allows you to collate/summarise individual values that are stored in a column, by for example, summing them, averaging them, displaying percentages of totals and so on.

The major advantages of a pivot table are that you can rearrange the items you put into the table quickly and easily by dragging and dropping; and you can create a chart from it by clicking a button.

Once you have your data in a list you can use the Data menu and there is a Pivot Chart option and you can drag and drop your data into the outline. Pivot tables are covered in more detail in the Advanced course.

Hope that helps

Tracy