Understanding pivot tables in Excel

Jesús
4 min readJul 17, 2022

One of excel’s most powerful features is not used by most of its users, due to lack of understanding.

It has even happened to me that, not understanding well how pivot tables work, I have used VBA to do things that I could have done with pivot tables in much less time.

In this story, I want to explain the basics, so that anyone who has never used pivot tables before can get started.

Original table

Let’s start with a simple table. We have a table in which we can see, by date, the product sold by each seller and its price.

Original Table

The aim will be to extract more information from this data using a pivot table.

How to create a pivot table

To create a pivot table from a table we have to select the whole table and, in the insert tab, select PivotTable

Insertion of a Pivot Table

Then, we press ok if we have selected correctly the original table.

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Jesús

I am an engineer and I love doing different projects in different programming languages, being Python and Excel the languages I use the most