Follow these easy steps to create an Excel pivot table, so you can quickly summarize Excel data. Watch the short video to see the steps, or follow the written steps. Get the free workbook, to follow along. There’s also an interactive pivot table below, that you can try, before you build your own!
NOTE: This tutorial gives you a quick overview of creating a pivot table. For detailed tutorial, go to the How to Plan and Set Up a Pivot Table page.
Create a Pivot Table
Watch this video, to see the steps for creating a pivot table in Excel 2013 and later. There are written instructions below the video.
Preparing Your Pivot Table Data
Before you create a pivot table, organize your data into rows and columns, and create an Excel Table. There are instructions here.
In this example the source data contains information about food sales, in two regions — East and West.
Creating a Pivot Table
After your source data is prepared, you can create a pivot table. First, see which pivot table layouts are suggested by Excel.
Select any cell in the source data table.
Modifying the Pivot Table
A pivot table is created in your workbook, on a new sheet, in the layout that you selected. When you select a cell within the pivot table, a PivotTable Field List appears, at the right of the worksheet.
You can change the layout of the pivot table, after it’s been created. We’ll add the TotalPrice field to the pivot table.
In the PivotTable Field List, add a check mark to the TotalPrice field. The TotalPrice field is automatically added to the pivot table, in the Values area, as Sum of TotalPrice.
Try This Pivot Table
Before you build your own pivot table, you can see how a pivot table works, by trying the interactive example shown below. Here are a few things you can try:
You can download a copy of the file, to test the pivot table features on your own computer.
Download the Sample File
Video: Create a Pivot Table
Here is a longer version of the video – Create a Pivot Table in Excel. The full transcript is below the video.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
A pivot table is a great way to summarize data in Excel. Here we have a table with sales records.
We can see where things were sold, what we sold, and how much and how much money we got on each sale. We can scroll down and see row after row of data.
It opens up a new window, and based on the data that I’ve got here, it’s suggesting some layouts
So the first one is showing the cities and then taking the total price and giving me the total sales in each city. That might be useful if I’m interested in where things are selling.
If we want to know what’s selling, here’s a layout that has the different product categories and then for each region how much we sold.
Below that, we can see those product categories again, and just the total price, instead of broken out by region.
You can scroll down, there are lots more options. If I go down further, we’re looking at the product categories and then the product names below that. This time it’s the quantity, rather than the price.
Here’s the layout that I selected. Now it’s got the quantity. I’m also going to add the total price. Over here, I can see all the fields from that data sheet.
This one went in as Sum of Total Price. This one is Count of Quantity. If I go back and look at my data, I can see that going down the quantity column, there’s one item here that’s text rather than a number.
So Excel sees this not as a number column, but as either text or mixed numbers and text. So it defaults to Count. But we can change that.
So now we can see the total quantity and the total price for each product category and product.
It’s a quick way to get started. You can change the layout after you’ve selected one of the sample layouts, but you’re up and running very quickly.
More Tutorials
FAQs – Pivot Tables How to Plan and Set Up a Pivot Table
Pivot Table Introduction
Last updated: April 22, 2021 7:15 PM