The Advantages of the Pivot Table

In this lesson we look at the advantages of using a pivot table and spoiler alert, it’s not just the time saving at initial creation.

It’s the time saving (not to mention accuracy) on review as a reviewer knows that you can’t mess around with individual pivot table cells. There’s the ease with which we can look at underlying data. Does a number in the table look odd? No problem, just double click on the cell and you’re presented with the rows of the underlying dataset from which that number has been aggregated.

It’s how quickly we can change the design of the table, the format and layout of the table

It’s the ease with which we can add new fields into the Pivot Table and take out fields that we don’t need. It’s the speed at which we can change the aggregation function of the Pivot Table from a SUM to a COUNT or to an AVERAGE and back again.

It’s how easy it is to refresh the tables with new data, or change to a completely new data source.

Pivot Tables are truly “Dynamic”.