Overview

Most people tend to shy away from Pivot Tables, as they see them as too complex – and to be honest, when you first use a Pivot Table the whole thing can seem a bit daunting. Don’t be put off by this as persistence will almost certainly pay off.

One of the main benefits of Pivot Tables is the fact that we can generate and extract meaningful information from a large table of data within a matter of minutes.

Pivot Tables are will not use up a lot of memory on your PC – in many cases we could get the same results from a table of data by using Excels built in functions, but this would take more time and use far more memory.

On top of this, if we wanted some new information we can simply drag-and-drop (hence the term, Pivot). We can also opt to have our information update each time we open the Workbook and/or by clicking refresh.

In Excel 2000, Microsoft introduced Pivot Charts. These are simply charts that are read from the table created via the Pivot Table Wizard. In fact Pivot Tables are really no longer just Pivot Tables, they are now PivotTables and PivotChart Reports. These two features go hand-in-hand with each other.

By this I mean, when you create a Pivot Table you can also create a Pivot Chart at the same time with no extra effort needed on your part. Pivot Charts allow us to create professional interactive charts that were previously not possible without either VBA or using Excel’s Controls.

Date and Time

10 October 2006, 19:30 – 21:30

Presenter

Mike Thomas