Pivot Tables are the MOST powerful feature in Excel and this book offers a comprehensive review of their functionality.Over 30 years combined experience, Bill Jelen and Michael Alexander's experience is difficult to replicate in any other team
Provides practical, real-world scenarios that not only demonstrate the benefits of Pivot Tables, but also explains how to avoid pitfalls of every day data crunching
Includes proven and creative Pivot Table recipes for fast results on the job.
What You Will Learn from This Book
It is widely agreed that close to 50% of Excel users leave 80% of Excel untouched. That is, most users don't tap into the full potential of Excel's built-in utilities. Of these utilities, the most prolific by far is the pivot table. Despite the fact that pivot tables have been a cornerstone of Excel for more than 12 years now, they remain one of the most underutilized tools in the entire Microsoft Office Suite. If you have picked up this book, you are savvy enough to have heard of pivot tables or even have used them on occasion. You have a sense that pivot tables have a power that you are not using, and you want to learn how to leverage that power to quickly increase your productivity.
Within the first two chapters, you will be able to create basic pivot tables, increase your productivity, and produce reports in minutes instead of hours. Within the first seven chapters, you will be able to output complex pivot reports with drill-down capabilities accompanying charts. By the end of the book, you will be able to build a dynamic pivot table reporting system.
What Is New in Excel 2007's Pivot Tables
Microsoft streamlined the pivot table interface to make it easier to use. In the last six versions of Excel, you generally created and modified a pivot table by dragging field names around the worksheet. Excel provided subtle visual clues about where a dropped field would appear, but these clues were too subtle for most. If you accidentally dropped a text field in the data area instead of the row area, disaster would result. Now, in Excel 2007, you can build a pivot table by checking a few boxes. Excel's IntelliSense figures out the best location for the field. To modify the default, you can drag field names around the PivotTable Field List.
Also new in Excel 2007 is the easier interface for sorting and filtering fields in a pivot table. Whereas sorting was formerly hidden three levels deep in the menu system, it is now just one click away from the PivotTable Field List.
Formatting such as heat maps, data bars, banded rows, and columns are now available as icons on the Excel 2007 Ribbon.
Finally, Microsoft is pushing a high-end server product that allows many people to access data stored in pivot tables. It is no surprise that pivot tables play a key role in the interactivity of Excel Services for SharePoint.
Skills Required to Use This Book
We have created a reference that is comprehensive enough for hard-core analysts yet relevant to casual users of Excel. The bulk of the book covers how to use pivot tables in the Excel user interface. The final chapter describes how to create pivot tables in Excel's powerful VBA macro language. This means that any user who has a firm grasp of the basics (preparing data, copying, pasting, entering simple formulas) should have no problem understanding the concepts in this book.
