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Pivot table tutorial

In this pivot table tutorial, you will learn what a Pivot table is, how they work and how they can benefit you and your business intelligence needs. This pivot table tutorial will explain the features and capabilities of a pivot table in plain English that anyone can understand.

In this tutorial, we are going to use the Pivot table examples in the numberGo Publisher business intelligence tool for this tutorial. If you want to follow along, download a FREE copy of the numberGo Publisher here, sample spreadsheet file here, and sample numberGo file here.

A Pivot table in the simplest form aggregates data by creating a dimension for each field and grouping the same values in a field.

OK – I know what you’re saying now “I have no idea what that means”. I’m going to explain this in fine detail.

To begin you should know that a Pivot table doesn’t always go by this name.
A Pivot table is one of many names for the same type of software component. Here is a list of other names in which a Pivot table may be known as:

Pivot grid
Pivot cube
Cube
Data cube

No matter the name they all do essentially the same thing. In order to better understand what a Pivot table does, we should look at some flat data in a spreadsheet. This spreadsheet shows sales data for a fictitious company that sells shirts.

The data in this spreadsheet has 7 columns (fields).
Region: The Region where the shirts were sold
Category: Is the shirt for a Boy or a Girl.
Shirt Style: The style of the shirt. Tee shirt, Golf shirt, and Polo
Ship Date: The date when the order was shipped
Units: The number of units shipped on the Ship Date
Price: The price per unit for the shirt.
Cost: The Cost per unit for the shirt.

Figure 1
Pivot Table Example

As you can see there is a lot of data here and this is only a subset of the actual spreadsheet. To better understand this data a Pivot table will take each column and create a dimension out of it.

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Free Business Intelligence Tool. Pivot, Chart, Report & Share.

Pivot table tutorial

Free Business Intelligence Tool.
Pivot, Chart, Report & Share.