Using Pivot Tables
Lamar Miller
In our text, we learn that pivot tables are a great tool that allow us to see the relevant data within a flat file or summary table. A summary table is where your raw data are aggregated so you can build a graph.
A flat file has each piece of data on its own line. Here, you will find a site that explains use cases for pivot tables as well as what they can do to help us export and visualize data.
Some elements of a pivot table include values, rows, columns and filters.
Pivot tables can help with various real-world examples such as sales volume by country. This data can be aggregated in a way where it is simplified down to the relevant data when telling a data story. This data can be sorted by country, year, quarter and dollar amount. This is useful when presenting to clients at your job or helping analyze trends for your own business.
After editing your data to your liking, you will be able to create the example above. This example depicts multiple categories of data which have been aggregated to include sub-categories, timelines and financials.
Pivot Tables
Pivot Tables are a highly useful interactive way to quickly summarize large amounts of data. It takes user-specified data fields and converts the headers into a data option that can be easily manipulated. Data can be summarized in numerous ways, including averages and frequencies. Lorman Education published an informative article about pivot tables. They describe 6 benefits of using a pivot table in Excel:
- Simplicity
- Data Analysis
- Data Summaries
- Pattern Recognition
- Quick Reports
- Decision Making
The image above is an example of a pivot table created by ExcelJet. It clearly demonstrates Sum of Sales by color in each region. Colors are sorted by row and regions are sorted by columns. The table also includes a total row according to each color and region, as well as a grand total.
This is another example of a pivot table created by ExcelJet using the same data, just with the rows and columns switched. There is a simple drag-and-drop method that can change the parameters of the table within seconds. ExcelJet also provides a few benefits of pivot tables:
- Simplicity
- Speed
- Flexibility
- Accuracy
- Formatting
- Updates
- Filtering
- Charts
Pivot Tables
Pivot tables are an incredibly powerful tool for organizing, analyzing, and summarizing large datasets. They enable users to transform raw data into meaningful insights with minimal effort.
Pivot tables allow you to quickly group, filter, and aggregate data. For example, you can calculate totals, averages, or counts with ease. Users have the ability to customize rows, columns, and values to focus on the specific insights that they need from their data.
The pivot table below shows the sum of sales over several years, broken down by product colors. It aggregates data annually from 2016 to 2019 and provides a grand total for each color across all years.
This layout is useful for identifying trends in sales performance for each color over time, helping businesses to determine which of their products have consistent demand from customers.
This next pivot table displays the sum of sales quantities for various fruits and vegetables across different countries. It also calculates grand totals for each product and country.
The above pivot table provides insights into the regional demand for specific products, supporting decisions on regional marketing strategies or inventory management.
The last pivot table, displayed below, summarizes monthly household spending across different categories for January, February, and March. It shows total amounts per category for each month and overall. This table is great for personal budgeting or financial analysis, offering a clear breakdown of expenses across categories over a defined period.
Pivot tables are indispensable for anyone who needs to make sense of data, whether for work, school, or personal use. They help you organize and summarize large amounts of information in a clear and easy-to-understand way. By grouping and analyzing data, pivot tables can show important patterns or trends, like which products sell best or where most money is being spent.
In short, pivot tables make data simple and actionable, helping you make better decisions with less effort.
What Are Pivot Tables?
Pivot tables are an incredibly powerful feature found in various spreadsheet software applications, such as Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, and others. They serve as a vital tool for users who need to summarize, analyze, and interpret large sets of data efficiently. By allowing users to reorganize and manipulate data, pivot tables transform rows into columns, which significantly enhances the ability to identify patterns, trends, and relationships within the data. This transformation is crucial for extracting meaningful insights from complex datasets, making pivot tables an indispensable resource for data analysis.
One of the standout advantages of pivot tables is their ability to facilitate quick data manipulation without making any changes to the original dataset. This means that users can experiment with different arrangements of data, apply filters to focus on specific subsets, and perform various calculations—all while preserving the integrity of the original information. This non-destructive approach to data analysis empowers users to explore their data from multiple angles, leading to more informed and effective decision-making. The flexibility offered by pivot tables is particularly appealing to a wide range of users, from students conducting research projects to professionals analyzing business performance.
Moreover, pivot tables allow users to create dynamic reports that can be easily updated as new data becomes available. This capability is especially beneficial in fast-paced environments where timely insights are crucial. Users can quickly adjust their pivot tables to reflect changes in the underlying data, ensuring that their analyses remain relevant and accurate. The ability to generate visual representations of data, such as charts and graphs, further enhances the interpretability of the information presented in pivot tables.
In summary, pivot tables significantly simplify the process of data analysis by providing users with a versatile and user-friendly interface for creating comprehensive reports. They save time and effort by automating many aspects of data manipulation, allowing users to concentrate on the most critical elements of their analysis. Overall, pivot tables are an essential tool for anyone looking to work with data effectively, whether for academic purposes, business intelligence, or personal projects. Their capacity to streamline data analysis and uncover valuable insights makes them a favorite among both novice and experienced users alike.
Pivot Table
Pivot tables help provide incredible insight for larger, more complex data sets, where end users are able to vary the functionality of the tables to better suit their needs. For example, a use case for a pivot table would be using it to manage inventory management. By implementing an inventory management system into a pivot table, we are able to see what items are used most frequently, identify less commonly used items that a business may have in stock, and could go a step further and implement a customer analysis pivot table with the data derived from the inventory management system.
In short, a pivot table summarizes large, complex data sets that can then be used to generate insights depending on which way the data leads it. The reason why they are so widely used is because of the simplicity they offer for the end user, allowing the user to know minimal skills but still create a very valuable data-driven tool through excel.
In this example, we can see how end users can manipulate this data set to see which countries have the most fruit, export the most fruit, or even rank them accordingly to biggest producers of each fruit! The possibilities of uses can go on, but the most important takeaway is to learn how to use the functionality within the pivot tables!
Pivot Pivot Pivot
What is a pivot table you may ask? A pivot table is a powerful data analysis tool used in spreadsheets (like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets) to summarize, analyze, explore, and present large datasets. It allows users to organize and aggregate data in a way that makes it easier to identify trends, patterns, and insights. Pivot tables are especially helpful when dealing with complex data that would be difficult to analyze manually.
A site I found that was really useful in breaking down what a pivot table is and why they are useful was from Polymer. What is a Pivot Table? Guide (Excel & Google) · Polymer · Polymer. This site even gave some real-life examples of when a pivot table would be used. For example:
1.Identifying your top-performing sales agents based on the value and volume of transactions.
2.Tracking the average transaction value across different customer segments.
3.Analyzing marketing or advertising campaigns in terms of leads generated, spending, and so on.
4.Highlighting the biggest business expenses per month, quarter, or year.
“Some of the best tools for building pivot tables utilize functions like SUM, AVERAGE, and MEDIAN to help answer data-related questions. The use of interactive elements, like filters and “sort” buttons, also differentiates pivot tables from regular, non-interactive tables”(POLYMER).
There is a youtube video that shows how to create your own pivot table using Excell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkmxrvIfDGA&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.polymersearch.com%2F&source_ve_path=OTY3MTQ
and also a video link of how to create one using Google Sheets https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=Tty0RyD1KLw&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.polymersearch.com%2F&source_ve_path=Mjg2NjY.
Here is an example of a Dataset that was more concisely organized into a pivot table and therefore easier to read and easier on the eyes if you ask me.
Step 1 Example Dataset:
| Date | Product | Region | Sales Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-01-01 | Widget A | North | 100 |
| 2024-01-01 | Widget B | South | 150 |
| 2024-01-02 | Widget A | East | 120 |
| 2024-01-02 | Widget B | North | 200 |
| 2024-01-03 | Widget A | South | 90 |
| 2024-01-03 | Widget C | East | 130 |
| 2024-01-04 | Widget C | North | 180 |
| 2024-01-04 | Widget B | South | 220 |
Step 2: Resulting Pivot Table
| Product | East | North | South | Grand Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Widget A | 120 | 100 | 90 | 310 |
| Widget B | 0 | 200 | 370 | 570 |
| Widget C | 130 | 180 | 0 | 310 |
| Grand Total | 250 | 480 | 460 | 1190 |
So, if you’re trying to display a large quantity data set, with a lot of different numbers and you’re trying to figure out the best way to do this… don’t just settle and clump all the data together on a report page. Rather PIVOT that plan and make yourself a pivot table of it.
Pivot Tables
Pivot tables are an extremely important data visualization tool. While they are usually not fancy eye catching infographics or your everyday chart you are used to seeing they are immensely important when it comes to summarizing data. According to an article posted by Lorman Education (https://www.lorman.com/resources/the-6-benefits-of-using-a-pivot-table-in-excel-17423?srsltid=AfmBOorilMT3KbGTr5SUhkNiuLVKiUIeKvuuAmAej7E1n-N3S3G7kmtX) there are 6 main benefits for using pivot tables:
- Simplicity
- Data Analysis
- Data Summaries
- Pattern Recognition
- Quick Reports
- Decision Making
Pivot tables can be helpful in distilling down large raw data into a summary of thousands or more entries to create a report based on data collected. For example, our book gives us a couple thousand survey entries on student’s gender, race, whether their parent has a college education, free or reduced lunch. high school name, graduation year, and other data. It becomes a sea of data to comb through and calculate.
This is where pivot tables come into play. It takes messy raw data like this and converts it into this.
It also gives us the ability to change the parameters of the chart if we want to examine it a different way. The applications of pivot tables could be endless such as business financials evaluations, evaluating performance, and any other thing that you collect data on!