Chapter 10. Creating Dynamic Lists with PivotTables

10. Creating Dynamic Lists with PivotTables

Chapter at a Glance

In this chapter, you will learn to:
	Create dynamic lists with PivotTables.
	Filter, show, and hide PivotTable data.
	Edit PivotTables.
	Format PivotTables.
	Create PivotTables from external data.

When you create Microsoft® Office Excel® 2007 worksheets, you must consider how you want the data to appear when you show it to your colleagues. You can change the formatting of your data to emphasize the contents of specific cells, sort and filter your worksheets based on the contents of specific columns, or hide rows containing data that isn't relevant to the point you're trying to make.

One limitation of the standard Office Excel worksheet is that you can't change how the data is organized on the page. For example, in a worksheet in which each column represents an hour in the day, each row represents a day in a month, and the body of the worksheet contains the total sales for every hourly period of the month, you can't easily change the worksheet so that it displays only sales on Tuesdays during the afternoon.

An Office Excel 2007 tool enables you to create worksheets that can be sorted, filtered, and rearranged dynamically to emphasize different aspects of your data. That tool is the PivotTable.

In this chapter, you'll learn how to create and edit PivotTables from an existing worksheet and how to create a PivotTable with data imported from a text file.

See Also

Do you need only a quick refresher on the topics in this chapter? See the Quick Reference entries on pages xxviilxiii.

Important

Before you can use the practice sites provided for this chapter, you need to install them from the book's companion CD to their default location. See "Using the Book's CD" on page xiii for more information.