What are PivotTables?

PivotTables in Excel are a powerful tool that helps us to conduct a thorough analysis of our data, making it quite easy for you to slice and dice, filter, sort and group information in the dynamic table according to our needs.

Basically they are a type of table that allow us to decide which variables appear as columns, as rows and as values ​​in the table and allow you to modify the structure quickly.

What are PivotTables for?

Let's answer this question with an example.

Imagine you have a list of sales by salesperson, month and product.


Something like the following table:

With a few clicks on your mouse we can present the information in a pivot table that looks like this:

Using a table like this is very easy to see the sales for each salesperson by region and product, but at the same time these variables could be modified in seconds and display the information as follows:

Please note that this table has been filtered by the year 2009 .

Or like this:

In this final table you can quickly see that Freddy has the highest sales volume in those three years .

There are many good things about PivotTables, one being that from a PivotTable you can get a visual or graphic representation quickly with a few clicks.