IN THIS INTRODUCTION
Pivot tables are the single most powerful feature in all of Excel. They came along during the 90s when Microsoft and Lotus were locked in a bitter battle for dominance of the spreadsheet market. The race to continually add enhanced features to their respective products during the mid-90s led to many incredible features, but none as powerful as the pivot table. With a pivot table, you can take 65,000 rows of transactional data and transform it into a summary report in seconds. If you can drag a mouse, you can create a pivot table. In addition to quickly summarizing and calculating data, pivot tables allow you to change your analysis on the fly by simply dragging fields from one area of a report to another. There is simply no other tool in Excel that gives you the flexibility and analytical power that pivot tables can give you. |