By Nick Ligameri

A Pivot Table is an extremely powerful tool that Excel offers that is used to easily manipulate aggregated data.  According to www.lumeer.io, “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.”  I think that, for most people, Pivot Tables can be intimidating because there are a lot of uses for them.  In this post, we’ll look at a couple of uses that make learning how to use Pivot Tables worth it. 

Pivot Tables are useful when you have large amounts of data that you want to analyze quickly.   If you are a direct-to-customer (D2C) business, you should probably learn how to utilize Pivot Tables.  My wife falls into this category, as she operates a cottage food business from our home.  She sells her baked goods directly to customers.  A way that I am going to investigate implementing a Pivot Table specifically for her business is to see how many of which ingredients she uses each month.  This can allow her to forecast how much she’ll need to buy each month.  This would allow her to purchase from a supplier in bulk, vs going to the grocery store on a weekly basis.  She’ll save time and money, which leads to larger profits!  

The above example I found from lido.app shows us that you can use a Pivot Table to quickly show average prices without having to create any formulas.  It also organizes the data based on product information. This example breaks it down by color.  You can also use Pivot Tables to quickly insert graphs based on what you need the data to tell you.  Below you can see that the same data is used to create a visualization that can be used in reports.