excel courses - What is a pivot

Hi Tracey,

Pivot tables allow you to take figures and associated labels stored in a list format in Excel, and summarise the figures in a table-like format.

This is something that's easier to see rather than explain - if you look up pivot tables in Excel Help, it provides some diagrams which will help you to understand how a pivot table displays information.

The advantage of the pivot table is that once it is created, parts of the table can be rearranged, for example, if I have years listed in rows and product names listed at the top of columns, I can switch these around.

You should have a data table associated with the Pivot table, so in theory you can delete the Pivot table and leave the data in the standard format.

I hope this gives you an idea of what pivot tables can do.
Tracy