Excel Pivot Table Instructions

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to show you how to use a pivot table in Microsoft Excel. Let's go to our computer and open up Excel by clicking on the Start button, let's go to all programs, let's find Microsoft Office and click on Excel. Now a pivot table is a special type of table, it allows you to do basically sorting and categories of your spreadsheet. So I'm just going to type in a really simple spreadsheet here, say employee, number of sales and location. Spread those out a little bit and I'm just going to type in some data. Now my employees are located in Alabama and Tennessee. So what I'm going to do is now that I have my spreadsheet typed is I'm going to select the data in that spreadsheet and I'm going to go to the insert tab at the top of Excel and I'm going to click on pivot table. Now this verifies the data range that you'd like to use since I've already selected it, I'm just going to go with the default. That opens your pivot table sort of wizard screen right here. Now we can choose what fields we want to include in our pivot table, I'm going to choose all three. As you can, it's already subgrouping on employee. Well it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to subgroup on employee, so instead I would rather subgroup on their location. So basically I just grab location, I'm going to pull that over to my report filter. Just going to drag it into the report filter area. Now as you can see I have a drop down here on the first row that says location and I can choose which one I'd like to show by checking the select multiple items. I just want to show Alabama and say OK. Now you can see that David who's the only one in Alabama is showing up and if I chose just Tennessee, you can see that the two employees who are shown in Tennessee are showing up. Now you can also get sums and you can do sorting and all kinds of things with a pivot table just by dragging them into these filter label and values areas. My name is Dave Andrews and I've just showed you how to use a pivot table in Microsoft Excel."