The Virtues of Pivot Tables

02/28/2011

Sam Phillips

Simply put, Pivot Tables are one of the most under-utilized bits of technology that is on nearly everyone’s computer.  It’s a little-advertised part of Excel.  It allows you to quickly aggregate up to a million rows of data, and allows you to quickly tweak (aka. “pivot”) the results to be aggregated differently at the click of a mouse.  Slap on one of Excel’s auto-updating graphs, and you have a BI (Business Intelligence) tool that can cover the lion’s share of what many users are trying to do with their data. Want to blow your manager’s mind?  Swap a couple of the “dimensions” like I have in the picture below.  The graph instantly updates, and your boss gets the report he or …[ MORE ]

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