What is a PivotTable?

A PivotTable is a powerful tool for exploring, summarizing, and analyzing information. A PivotTable helps you organize and manipulate the raw data in your spreadsheet to provide insight into patterns or relationships that might not be obvious at first glance. PivotTables also give you the power to summarize your data and view it in a different context, without changing the original content or structure of the data in the worksheet.

With a PivotTable, you can conveniently drag and drop columns of your data to different areas of the table to examine relationships or trends that may not be obvious in a traditional Excel table or database. (You can base a PivotTable on data in your current workbook or on external data.)

Rather than build several regular tables to explore how columns from an Excel worksheet relate to each other (or to see the data summarized in different ways), you can use one PivotTable to do the same thing. With a PivotTable, you can alter the table design without cutting, copying, pasting, or adjusting formulas and cell references. In short, PivotTables enable you to organize your data in meaningful ways, without doing a lot of tedious work. You could say that a PivotTable is like several data tables rolled into one.

Ideally, the source data for a PivotTable should be structured like a traditional Excel table or database. The source data should have a row of unique column headings distinguishing the data, and there should be no empty columns interspersed within the data. Also, blank rows in the source data can limit the usefulness of your PivotTable.