For my example of uses for pivot tables I decided to make a pivot table for some research I’ve been doing for the past 3 years at Stockton looking at yield data for garlic harvests.

The above screenshot is just a segment of the stacked data in its raw format. It floods you with numbers and is difficult to sort through and get any information out of. That’s where a pivot table comes in. These let you easily select data to look at with the click of a button, and they also have a huge amount of customization to get the exact information you need.

This first example shows how well each type of garlic grew during each year of the study. We can see from this that the top grower varied from year to year. Hardnecks were often grown in the highest volumes, making their total weight the highest, but either Rocambole or Softnecks had the highest average weight during each year. This means that if these varieties were grown in higher volumes they may outcompete the hardnecks.

Another factor we can look at is time. This pivot table selection shows us that overall, we grew larger crops with each year. This is probably because with each year we learned how to take better care of the garlic, as well as we selectively picked the best garlic to grow each year. These are factors that you have to take into consideration.

The final pivot table I made looks at each variety of garlic and is ranking them based on their average weight. We can see from this that on average, Kisklyk was the most successful variety. I like to have these numbers next to the total count and sum of the harvest weights because we can see the best producing garlic isn’t always the one that has the highest total weight. This graph shows us that Silver white is our highest producer because we also happened to grow way more of it then our other varieties.

In the end this process of creating pivot tables can give us answers to our experimental questions. However it also leads us to more questions, which we can answer with further experimentation or reasearch.

-Jack Swenson