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Pivot Tables
A pivot table is a data analysis tool that can be used to organize and summarize large data sets. Large data sets can be cumbersome and include extraneous data that does not pertain to the use case. A pivot table can create an organized chart that functions to create a subset of data that can be explored in a more dynamic way.
Pivot tables are great for interactive dashboards that aid in data analysis. They can simplify very large and complex data sets. Pivot tables can be simple or more advanced using techniques like slicers and calculated fields. Slicers are great for dashboards because they allow users to select different groups of data to view. Users have a more granular view of the dataset that is relevant to specific information they may be looking for. Slicers also allow users to navigate dashboards like the example in the textbook. I’ve tried creating pivot tables multiple software and have found that Excel is the best application and Numbers is also easy to use.
Myexcelonline.com has a great tutorial to create a pivot table. They also have a picture of the final table showing the different elements of a pivot table.
https://www.myexcelonline.com/blog/customising-pivot-table-styles/
I would actually like to master pivot tables because I know that they are ideal for use in financial reporting. Financial datasets tend to be overwhelmingly large and difficult to summarize. Zebrabi.com suggests using a tabular hierarchy pivot table as shown below along with visuals for financial reporting.
Pivot Tables
A pivot table is a useful way to sum up large amounts of categorized data into a shorter and simpler table. It does this by taking each group or category and summing it up to get the totals per group rather than the every little piece of information. By using a pivot table, the information is presented in a much neater and efficient way. Pivot tables also allow you to sort and analyze the data much quicker and spot any outliers, or other sums that may need addressing.
The image below shows a sample of some data that could be best presented in a pivot table. The example uses resellers with different types of fruit over a three-month period to see how many sales and overall income each reseller brings in for each type of fruit.
If we were to turn this charted data into a pivot table, we could easily see totals per fruit, per reseller, and per month in order to more easily analyze the data and get the results we need. The chart below shows the pivot table of this data.
As you can see, there are several different ways to display the data in a pivot table, depending on which type of information you want highlighted. Each of these examples gives the results and totals more quickly than if you were to just stare at the initial table and figure this out. While this example is just a sample with random fruits and resellers, it could also be applied to major corporations who are trying to figure out which of their chains needs more help or which is the most successful. Once again, pivot tables can really be used for a variety of data and ultimately make a person’s life a lot easier when it comes to analyzing and summarizing big sets of data.
https://www.ablebits.com/office-addins-blog/excel-pivot-table-tutorial/
Pivot Tables
Pivot tables are a powerful excel features that allows users to organize their data with the click of a button. Useful for quickly analyzing large sets of data, pivot tables allow you to quickly find the measures of central tendency, frequency of data entries, as well as sums, products, and more. To dig into an example, check out the pivot table below:
To highlight some useful functions, imagine a business that has a system of keeping track of client transactions. The table above contains information regarding the donorID, which is a unique identifier for each donor. If a business owner was interested in keeping track of their most frequent and largest donors, trending dates in which donations are more likely, or the average donation, all of this information would be available at the click of a button.
Source: https://www.perfectxl.com/excel-glossary/how-to-use-pivot-table-excel/
Pivot Tables
https://exceljet.net/articles/excel-pivot-tables
A pivot table can be used for a variety of reasons to portray data. A pivot tables usefulness truly comes to light when one has to summarize large amounts of qualitative/quantitative data. It can provide a flexible and efficient way to not only separate the data into individual rows and columns, but also make it easier to identify patterns, and trends that may not have been noticed. As shown by the data provided above by Exceljet, the pivot table ran automatic calculations on the summed/counted values and the data was segmented by date, color and other variables. Furthermore, with the information provided, the user can now calculate the percentage values of each calculation if desired. Lastly a pivot table is also very easy to create as well as understand. There is no need to learn complex formulas and one simply has to enter the data and insert the table or use drag and drop tool depending on what visualization tool they are using. All in all, pivot tables are a great way to organize data into rows/columns and simplify data.
Pivot Tables
A pivot table is an extremely useful and powerful feature in Excel. It allows you to extract the significant information from a large, detailed data set. When you have a very large data set it is hard to see any trends or come to conclusions about the data. With a couple clicks, pivot tables can help readers better understand the data by summarizing it and showcasing the important information.
On the left is a raw data set of clothes sales. It includes the date of the sale, order number, item type, total cost, and state of purchase. The sheet extends for many rows and gets super overwhelming. The pivot table of the data is shown on the right. This organized the data and sorted it by the item of clothing. It then tallied up how much of each item was sold and also presented the total sales from each item. This is way easier to read and helps show trends and important information. You can see that hoodies were sold the most with 59 of them, and they also made the most money with $2,006. You can also see a total of 213 items were sold for $5,252. In conclusion, pivot tables are a great way to summarize a lot of information very quickly and easily.
Pivot Tables
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.
Pivot Tables
Pivot tables can be classified as a data analysis technique that can summarize large datasets and allows one to extract the significance from them. It sorts and summarizes large datasets, automatically.
Below is a typical example of a pivot table:
The pivot table above summarizes large data sets, making it easy to comprehend. In pivot table 1 above, the apples are summed up in the fourth column and first row. It categorizes the total number of apples owned by John, Mike, et cetera. Pivot tables may appear to be cumbersome when trying to create them for the first time. However, they are very easy to create once the steps are followed carefully.
There are many uses for pivot tables. The list includes, querying large amounts of data in many user-friendly ways, subtotaling and aggregating numeric data, summarizing data by categories and sub-categories, et cetera.
This link teaches you how to create a pivot table within few minutes.
Pivot Tables
I have found that pivot tables are good ways to summarize a lot of data. I think they work particularly well with data that involves a large quantity of numbers. They are very useful because they are great visual and interactive ways for readers to conceptualize numbers within the data set and clearly see what is being portrayed in the overall data story.
Here are some great examples of pivot charts and why they are so helpful:
Example #1
This is an example of a pivot table I got from a very helpful website that shows how to create great tables! On the left is their source data and on the right is their pivot table. It is much easier to see the data within the pivot table because it is much more condensed and only has the information that is important to the reader. Instead of being overwhelmed with numbers and data, it is way more digestible in this form.
Example #2
This next example also comes from a really helpful website to aid in creating pivot tables. What I really like about this particular example is that it highlights all the different ways the same information can be laid out. Excel does a really good job at offering the creator choices in layouts to make the creation of an effective pivot chart much easier. As seen here in this example, the layout of a pivot chart can really change the goals of what you want the chart to do.
All in all, I think pivot charts are great ways to display numerical information. There are plenty of websites to help in the aid of creating them and using tools like Excel also makes it very easy!
Pivot Tables
By: Veronica Perkins
Like any other visualization, the intention is to help visualize the data being presented to an audience. The purpose of a pivot table, is to help visualize and a large amount of data at one time. A typical pivot table looks like this:
As you can see, a lot of information is presented in the format of a pivot table. This pivot table is an example of how a lot of information is summarized. In this example, the maker wanted to present the sales from the past three years. They decided to break it down between the following: year, month, type (meaning what was sold), the salesperson that sold it, the region of the sale, the sale amount, how many units were ordered and the order number that correlates to the sale. Pivot tables can be so helpful to use because they can help break down a large amount of data at a glance. This information, can also be used to make visualizations to help represent the data.
