1. Organizing Rows and Columns
In the last lesson, you learned how to create the shell of a pivot table. Now you will begin to populate the pivot table with data. While there are many options to building your pivot table, the first choice is often selecting the rows and columns.
2. Adding rows to your pivot table pt 1
You'll start with the worksheet tab you created last time, which shows the pivot table editor on the right hand side, and a blank shell of the pivot table within your worksheet. The first thing you want to do is to select a category to go in the Rows field. When you click on Add next to the Rows section, you will see a dropdown list which contains the column headers from your source data.
3. Adding rows to your pivot table pt 2
Now, when you select any of these categories, the pivot table will list all of the unique values found in that column of your source data. I will select Industry, and the pivot table will now show all of the industries contained in my original dataset. Now we have a list of industries for the Top 10 companies in the world.
4. Adding columns to your pivot table
Next, you can select categories for the Columns field the same way. By clicking Add, you will see the dropdown menu containing the same list of column headers. I will select Year, and the pivot table now shows all of the years that are contained in the source data.
5. Adding multiple rows or columns
You can select multiple rows or columns as well, by clicking Add again, and selecting another category. In the rows section, I will add the category Name so that the name of each company is listed underneath the industry. Do you see any surprises on this list? It looks like the Petroleum Refining industry is doing well, with four companies in the top ten!
Please note that you can re-arrange the order of the rows by clicking and dragging the field names above or below each other. You can also click and drag them from rows to columns, or columns to rows.
Finally, to remove one of the fields, you can simply press the "x" in the top right corner of the field name.
6. Let's practice!
Let's try a few examples, and then in the next lesson, we will learn about adding values to the pivot table.