What is a Pivot Table and how to create it: complete guide for 2020 (from beginners to advanced with real world examples)
By: Martin Večeřa
Tags: Data Analysis, Pivot, Excel, Pivot Tables

What is a Pivot Table and how to create it: complete guide for 2020 (from beginners to advanced with real world examples) Martin Večeřa Follow Jun 10, 2020 · 5 min read

Our aim is to provide you with the simplest introduction and the easiest explanation of what is a Pivot Table that you can find.

After reading this article, you will understand the principles of pivot tables. You will know how they work under the hood. You will also learn how to analyse your business data.

If you have never created a pivot table, or you can create them but it feels like magic to you, this is the right article for you.

Even if you are an everyday user of the pivot tables, you can gain a deeper knowledge of their inner workings.

What is a Pivot Table and how does it work?

A Pivot Table is one of the basic data analysis tools. Pivot Tables can quickly answer many important business questions.

One of the reasons we build Pivot Tables is to pass information. We would like to support our story with data that is easy to understand, easy to see.

Although Pivot Tables are only tables and thus missing real visuals, they can still be considered as a mean of Visual Storytelling.

How to master Pivot Tables?

Pivot tables’ mastery might seem rather hard. However, with a few basic principles, you can understand it very well. You can easily get up to speed with your colleagues who are more advanced in this area.

And of course you will bring your value on the job market a bit higher.

How does a Pivot Table work? The rest of this guide will explain that to you step by step using concepts that are familiar to you…

Why do we need pivot?

What is the use of a Pivot Table?

A Pivot Table is used to summarise, sort, reorganise, group, count, total or average data stored in a table. It allows us to transform columns into rows and rows into columns. It allows grouping by any field (column), and using advanced calculations on them.

You can find some more technical detail in various articles on the web like https://www.kohezion.com/blog/what-is-a-pivot-table-examples-and-uses/.

However, such an explanation might raise more questions than answers.

There are more prosaic reasons.

What are the practical examples of a Pivot Table?

Use a pivot table to build a list of unique values. Because pivot tables summarize data, they can be used to find unique values in a table column. This is a good way to quickly see all the values that appear in a field and also find typos, and other inconsistencies. [https://exceljet.net/pivot-table-tips]

More simple explanation is that a pivot table can:

group items/records/rows into categories

count the number of items in each category,

sum the items value

or compute average, find minimal or maximal value etc.

In a few easy steps, we will see how pivot tables work. Then, no pivot table creating will seem hard anymore.

Let’s start with an example. We will use something we all know very well…

Pivot Tables in various tools

So far we were speaking in very general terms with no specific tool in mind. You can use your new knowledge in any tool your company works with — Microsoft Office, Libre Office, Open Office, Google Sheets and many many more…

Let’s have a look at what the Pivot Table settings looks like in the most popular tools so that you are familiar with it and ready to use the tools straight away!

For all the tools, we used the same data about pizza sales as in previous examples.

Our goal is to recreate the complex Pivot Table with pizza sales by Employee, Pizza and Month. This means that the first Row Label is Employee, the second Row Label is Pizza, the Column Label is Month (from the Date and Time column) and the Summation Values are counts.

How do you create a Pivot Table?

In most tools you simply highlight the sheet region and click a function (mostly in Data menu) to create a Pivot Table. You can have a look at an example with Microsoft Office.

In Microsoft Office, there is a function called Ideas that can even suggest some basic Pivot Tables based on what is found on the current sheet. This can be a good start to work with.

Where to go next?

If you are an Excel fan, you might want to check some interesting articles on Pivot Tables in Excel:

Debra Dalgleish (an owner of Contextures) who is also a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional published a lot of articles on Pivot Tables at her web sites like:

Wen Hsiu Liu leads the Excel! Taiwan group.

Leila Gharani publishes articles on how to use Excel for data analysis and visualisations.

If you are a french native speaker, you might find the site Le CFO masqué by Sophie Marchand useful.

You can also check some online courses at Udemy:

Most of the principles introduced for Excel are valid in other spreadsheet editors.

For Google Sheets, there is a comprehensive Pivot Tables in Google Sheets Beginners Guide by Ben L. Collins.

However, it is important to note that the trends for the future are directed towards self evolving enterprise systems. Such systems demand less and less human intervention and manual work.

From such a point of view, Excel as a data analysis tool might soon be replaced by tools with artificial intelligence that actually understand the data meaning and can shift the way we work.

For more details, you can refer to the Accenture’s Future Ready Enterprise Systems report.