Excel 2019 PivotTables: Easy Excel Essentials 2019, #1

Also by M.L. Humphrey

Listing of all books by M.L. Humphrey

Easy Excel Essentials 2019

Excel 2019 PivotTables

Excel 2019 Charts

Excel 2019 Conditional Formatting

Excel 2019 IF Functions

Excel Essentials 2019

Excel 2019 Beginner

Excel 2019 Intermediate

Excel 2019 Formulas & Functions

Access Essentials

Access for Beginners

Intermediate Access

Excel 2019 PivotTables

Easy Excel Essentials 2019 - Book 1

M.L. Humphrey

Contents

Introduction

PivotTables

Conclusion

Appendix A: Basic Terminology

About the Author

Copyright

Introduction

The Easy Excel Essentials 2019 series of titles are for intermediate-level users who want to focus on one specific topic such as PivotTables, Charts, Conditional Formatting, or the IF Functions.

The content of each title is extracted from either Excel 2019 Intermediate or Excel 2019 Formulas & Functions which cover intermediate-level Excel topics in more detail.

These books are written using Excel 2019 and assuming that a user is working in that program. If you are using an older version of Excel, the Easy Excel Essentials series may be a better choice since it was written using Excel 2013 and for a more general audience of Excel users.

With that introduction, let’s dive in on how to use PivotTables.

PivotTables

Before we get started, for the record I passionately hate how they write PivotTable as one word with capital letters in the middle. But that’s how they do it, so that’s how we’ll try to do it. (I may slip up once or twice, but I’ll try to catch myself. While we’re on the subject I also passionately hate how their labels and menu options in their dialogue boxes don’t use title case and so you’ll often see that I do.)

Alright then. Now that that’s out of my system.

If you learn one intermediate-level Excel concept let it be PivotTables. I literally chose to write the first two books in the original Excel Essentials series (Excel for Beginners and Intermediate Excel) in order to teach writers how to use Excel well enough for them to use PivotTables.

That’s how useful these things are: I was willing to write thousands of words about the basics of Excel just to get people to the point where we are right now where I could teach them how to use PivotTables.

What They Do

So what are PivotTables? What do they do? Why are they so special?

A PivotTable takes rows and rows of data and lets you create a nice little summary table of that data based upon your chosen parameters.

Let me give you an example of how this can be useful.

Let’s say you sell widgets, whatsits, and whatchamacallits. And every time you sell one of those items your distributor (the place you sell through) creates a line of data in an Excel worksheet that has the state where the sale occurred, the retail price, and the net amount due to you for that transaction, and you want to know what you’ve earned in each state so you can target advertising.

You could filter your data to see this or use subtotals even, but a far better option is to create a