An Introduction to Pivot Tables

Welcome to the FDTC’s course on pivot tables! This is one of our favourite and most useful courses as pivot tables are probably the most useful tool to any member of a Finance Team (until PowerQuery and Powerpivot came along!).

So what is a pivot table?

Well, a pivot table should really be called a summary table as they sumarise datasets, large or small based on any criteria that is in the dataset that the user chooses.

Let’s say you’ve got a great big dataset of sales data and you want to see the total amount of sales by salesperson for analysis or perhaps for revenue journal postings. You could do that by creating a formula table using SUMIFS. However, that would take a while to write, and every time you wanted to add in a new criteria, you’d need to rewrite the formulas.

A pivot table will do the summary instantly, and any changes that you want to make, by bringing in additional summarising fields, can be done simply and quickly.