PivotTables

I think I mentioned this in class, but understanding and being able to use PivotTables is one of the MAJOR concerns that firms have when you go out on your internship/staff position, so we will spend an entire class period on a topic that is covered in 8 pages (or so) in your book. 

To get an idea of the power of PivotTables, check out the following video:



A few rules of thumb for formatting:

(1) Always make sure you are spelling correctly (F7) and are appropriately formatting all data fields.

(2) When you are trying to decide if a field should be the ROW or the COLUMN, the field that contains more items should be the ROW.  This is because when looking at Excel we can typically see more rows than columns, and we can fit more data in our screenshot following this methodology.  Sometimes, form will drive us away from this rule of thumb and that is okay.  For example, let's consider data that has fields for Division (let's assume our data includes 3 divisions) and Date (we have data for 12 months).  Division would be the ROW and Date would be the COLUMN even though the "rule of thumb" would suggest otherwise.  This is because we know that dates are typically shown in columns, especially with respect to financial data. 

One final thing about rows and columns.  If there is a field that is a subset of another field...say branches within regions, we will typically use both fields as rows (with region listed first, then branch) or columns.