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Demystifying Pivot Tables: A College Student’s Guide to Data Analysis
Introduction:
Just a little bit of interest and a desire to try something new will do; coding is not anything to be concerned about. We’ll dispel common misconceptions about pivot tables, go over their applicability, and demonstrate how to utilize them to make an impression on potential employers and teachers in this blog post.
What Makes Pivot Tables So Special?
“How on earth do I make sense of all this?” is undoubtedly on your mind as you look at this enormous spreadsheet filled with figures. Presenting pivot tables, your newfound ally in the data analysis space. You can organize and summarize your data using these useful tools without having to be a Ph.D. spreadsheet expert.
How Do They Work?
Think of pivot tables as virtual LEGO blocks for your data. You can drag and drop your columns into different areas to create a customized table that highlights the trends and insights you’re looking for. It’s like magic, but for data geeks like us.
Cool Features You Need to Know:
Summarize Like a Pro: Want to know the average, sum, or count of your data? Pivot tables have got you covered.
Filtering Magic: Zoom in on the stuff that matters by using filters to focus on specific data points.
Grouping Goodness: Let pivot tables do the heavy lifting by automatically grouping your data by date, category, or any other field you fancy.
Make it Pretty: Customize the look of your data with formatting options. Impress your friends with a sleek and professional-looking report.
Real-Life Applications for College Life:
Grade Analysis: Wondering which classes are your strong suits? Pivot tables can help you break down your grades by subject or semester.
Budget Crunching: Keep track of your spending habits by categorizing expenses and creating a budget overview.
Extracurricular Excellence: Use pivot tables to analyze your involvement in clubs, sports, or other activities. Spot trends and areas where you can level up.
Conclusion:
Pivot tables might sound a bit intimidating at first, but trust us, they’re a game-changer for anyone dealing with data – and that includes you, college student! As you navigate through your academic and personal life, having these skills in your toolkit will make you stand out. So, grab that spreadsheet, give pivot tables a spin, and get ready to conquer the world of data analysis with confidence!
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 Table for Garlic
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
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.