How To Impress Your Boss With Pivot Tables

The old way of working stuff out is to use a pen and paper and snap pencils and throw things at walls when you jab the wrong button on a calculator and lose everything.
Fortunately, that's not really the case anymore. These days, things are a little bit more sensible and impressive-looking. Pivot tables look at all your numerical data and then answer questions about it .
So if you've got a huge big spreadsheet full of sales figures, you can make an interactive Pivot Table out of it so the date is easy-as-pie to sort and view.

Step 1: Set Up Your Document

Before you get going , you need to understand that Pivot Tables will only work their magic if your document is set up properly. That means all your columns – sales data, country, that sort of thing will get turned into a ‘field' in the Pivot Table. Keep all your data nicely ordered – don't put any text into the ‘sales' column, else everything will get confused and break.
Also, make sure none of your columns and rows are empty.

Step 2: Click The Pivot Table Button

Not quite yet! But nearly. First make sure you're in the right workbook—Pivot Tables will take into account everything in the workbook, so make sure you're in the right set of data.
Go to the Insert Tab, then click Pivot Table.
It's all basically filled in for you, so you shouldn't need to change any options in the little box that pops up. You can, if you want. But you shouldn't need to. The squiggles and what-have-you relate to the data in your document. It'll be highlighted in the background so you can see it's right.

Step 3: Get To Work!

When you close the “Create PivotTable” box, some new stuff will pop up in your workbook. This is where you're going to sort out all the data.
Over to the right, you'll see your ‘fields'. Select which ones you want to include in your Pivot Table report, and they'll get added instantly, using Computer Magic. Or, you can drag them into the areas below.

Step 4: Bask In Your Unmitigated Brilliance

It's an interactive little table, look! Drop down menus let you sort the fields and add or remove certain elements.
If you double-click a field – say, ‘Sales', you can change it to show the data you're interested in. Whether that's the average sales, the maximum value, the minimum value. It's all displayed in a funky, interactive little report.


Your boss will be so impressed he'll probably send you one right back detailing exactly how much he's going to raise your salary by. If not, make a bigger, better pivot table next time, and keep at it until he gives in.

Done.