A Complete Guide to Pivot Tables

r3lody (Raymond Lodato) writes "Like most people, I've only scratched the surface (well, maybe I gouged it a bit) of the capabilities of the Microsoft Office products. There are more features buried in them than most users ever discover. I use Microsoft Excel frequently in my job to analyze all sorts of data. When they came out with Pivot Tables, I dabbled in them and found several uses for them. However, documentation being what it is, I never really got to understand and utilize Pivot Tables' full capabilities. Now, Apress has published A Complete Guide to Pivot Tables: A Visual Approach, by Paul Cornell." Read on for the rest of Lodato's review. A Complete Guide to Pivot Tables: A Visual Approach author Paul Cornell pages 368 publisher Apress rating 10/10 reviewer Raymond Lodato (rlodato AT yahoo DOT com) ISBN 1590594320 summary A well-researched step-by-step tutorial on the use and programming of Microsoft Excel PivotTables for data analysis.

If you have any need to analyze data in Excel, you must read this book. I learned so much more about PivotTables after I read it that they are now actually useful, rather than just being something I would occasionally try out. Every chapter is packed with excellent information in an easy-to-follow format. A beginning to intermediate user can understand most of the book; only the chapter on programming PivotTables requires intermediate to advanced knowledge to fully comprehend.

Cornell takes a tutorial approach to explaining what PivotTables are, what they are capable of doing, and how you can apply them to your needs. Each chapter in the Complete Guide gives you an overview of a single topic, a series of step-by-step examples, a Try-It section for more practice, and a summary of next steps. The book was written for Excel 2003, but most of the techniques can be applied to Excel 2002 and even Excel 2000.

When you read this book, I would recommend that you sit at your computer to try these techniques as you read them. I tried to just read the book at first, but you really get itchy to try each feature out. Take it in sequence, as there is a definite building from one chapter to the next.

Chapter 1 gives you an overview of the PivotTable feature, what it's meant to do, and why you would use it. Chapter 2 starts the in-depth training of building basic PivotTables from Excel Lists, external data sources, other PivotTables, etc. It also includes tips on formatting the information and tweaking the fields and table to your liking. Chapter 3 goes even deeper, with information on advanced settings, filters, calculated fields, and other little gems that make analysis easier. These three chapters complete your basic training and lead to chapter 4, "Using PivotTables in the Real World." Paul proceeds to give not just one, but three examples of how PivotTables could be used to provide insight into company operations.

While everything I'd known about PivotTables before picking up this book was covered in the first three chapters, the last three chapters explain additional capabilities that really make Excel valuable for data analysis. Chapter 5 explains PivotCharts, which are simply a graphical representation of the information shown in a PivotTable. Paul goes into detail on the different chart types and how they interact with the underlying PivotTable.

If you need to distill and analyze multidimensional, relational data, PivotTables are up to the task, as chapter 6 will demonstrate. The book describes how you use cube files, OLAP databases, and Microsoft Query to get the data and manipulate it. If you're a really capable programmer, comfortable with VBA, chapter 7 shows you how to work with PivotTable programmatically. There is program after program showing you exactly how to get at the data, massage it, and create the resulting PivotTable.

Finally, there is one appendix that describes the differences between Excel 2000, Excel 2002, and Excel 2003. I was originally reviewing this book while using a computer with Excel 2000. I was delighted to find out that most of the information in the book works exactly as Paul described (although the screen shots didn't match). I did recheck some of the examples on my other machine running Excel 2002, and had no problems at all.

Granted, this book is specifically written for Microsoft Excel. However, OpenOffice, the free competitor from Sun MicroSystems, mimics most of the Microsoft Office suite. How does it compare, you ask? Well, OpenOffice has a similar facility to PivotTables, called DataPilot; however, DataPilot is primitive in comparison. For example, you must select the data to summarize, choose (from the menu bar) Data --> DataPilot --> Start, then drag the fields to the appropriate place in the diagram and click OK. Like Excel, you can freely move the fields between row, column, and data areas, and change the data operation from Sum to Min, Max, or a number of others. Unlike Excel, there isn't much more you can do. You don't have Page fields; you can't sort fields on their data; PivotCharts aren't represented; and there's no programming. If you only want to do simple data analysis in OpenOffice, you can get the basics from chapters 1 and 2 of this book.

You can purchase A Complete Guide to PivotTables: A Visual Approach from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Re:What IS a pivot table anyway?

[FrereTuck]

Read this: http://www.cpearson.com/excel/pivots.htm

The first rule of PivotTables...

[Aardpig]

...is you do not tell anybody what PivotTables are.

Re:OK, so what is it?

[hj43us]

Pivot tables allow you to cross count units withing categories. Imagine you hava a table of stock, you have shoes. Shoes have size number and model id. A pivot table can easily tell you the number of shoes of each size of each model. Of course you can get the same values out of simple SQL query (i.e. select count(*),model,size from shoes group by model,size) The difference is the pivot table will look like a double entry table instead of the long listing the query above might provide. I'm not sure I know enoguh to full a book about this. Cheers.

Re:What IS a pivot table anyway?

[roman_mir]

Pivot table means that; it's pivotal. I mean, you're a -- you've been given pivotality, and you're viewed as a pivotal entity. And therefore the relationship between the data and tables is one between pivotal entities."

Pivot Table History

[bstarrfield]

Pivot tables were originally developed in Lotus Improv, Lotus's incredibly advanced word processor for the NeXT machine. Lotus attempted to develop a new paradigm (can't believe I used that word) for spreadsheet interaction, something more sophisticated that +A1+@sum(B1..B3). Pivot tables were a component of this formulaless spreadsheet.

Improv was, is friggin' amazing.

I suppose this is another example of Microsoft getting credit for company's innovations?

Summary of what a Pivot Table is

[Wrexen]

Say you have data like this:

Name Age Height (cm)
---------------------
Jane 22 174
Dick 22 212
Mary 24 150
Greg 24 198
Dave 23 244

You can use pivot tables to come up with tables like this (but with correctly calculated values :)):

Age Avg Height
--------------
22 190.5
23 244
24 174.5

For the most simple case, take any N-dimensional data, choose one of the dimensions to be your rows, choose one of the dimensions to be your columns, and choose a function of a dimension to be your field values. The more dimensions and data points you have, the more useful this becomes.

A simple example of pivot tables

[sjbe]

The best way to understand pivot tables is probably by example. Lets say we have a spreadsheet with four categories of data: Country, Continent, GDP, and Population. These are listed in columns, with corresponding entries next to each other like so (apologies for bad formatting):

Country Continent GDP Pop
China Asia $1000 1,000,000,000
Japan Asia $5000 100,000,000
USA North Am $15000 280,000,000

Then lets say we are interested in finding the population of countries on our list which a located in asia. Pivot table provide a fast way to sort data as well as conduct simple mathematical operations on lists of data.

Using a pivot table I could end up with a matrix that looks like:

Continent Country Population
Asia China 1,000,000,000
Japan 100,000,000
North Am USA 280,000,000

Now I have the data sorted by continent. If I decide I'm not interested in population but instead in GDP, it is a simple drag and drop operation to get a table like:

Continent Country GDP
Asia China $1000
Japan $5000
North Am USA $15000

Basically pivot tables let you explore lists of data very quickly and efficiently. If you deal with lists of data regularly like I do, they are one of the most indespensible features in a spreadsheet. Excel has the best ones I've used but most modern spreadsheets have some version of them.