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5 pivot tables you probably

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haven't seen before
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by DAVE BRUNS | September 18, 2014 Function Guide
Formula Examp
Formula
One thing you might have noticed about pivot tables is
Criteria
that almost all the examples you see are based on sales
Excel Shortcuts
data. This makes sense in a way: sales is where the
Pivot Tables
money is, and companies always have sales data in one
101 Excel
form or another. However, pivot tables can handle a lot
Functions
more than just sales. Any time you need to work with
Excel Tables
data, you should be thinking about pivot tables.
INDEX and
To illustrate how exible and useful pivot tables are, here MATCH
are ve interesting examples you probably haven't seen Excel Charts
before. I'm not going to explain how to create each pivot Conditional
table in this article (I'll leave that for another day). I just Formatting
want to give you some ideas about how you can use pivot Custom
tables with your own data. Number
Formats
Time tracking Data Validation
Nested IF
Imagine you need to log time for different clients and examples
projects and periodically report your time by client and Formula
project. There are of course many applications dedicated challenges
to time-tracking, but you can easily create your own How-to videos
exible system using Pivot Tables. Excel glossary
Excel people
At a minimum, what you need to record is a date, the
Excel books
time you spent, the client name, and the project. So,
Recent
after you enter the data consistently, you might end up
comments
with source data that looks something like this:
Key functions

IF function
VLOOKUP funct
SUMIFS
function
COUNTIFS
function
INDEX
function
Note that there are no blank lines - you just need to enter MATCH
the data as you go. function
SUMPRODUCT
Now the summaries. First, you might want an overview of
function
your time by week. Here we are using the week numbers
provided by Excel's WEEKNUM function (see column C of
the source data):
 Hi - I'm Da
and I
run
Exceljet
with my
wife, Lisa. Our goal is
to help you work
faster in Excel. We
create short videos,
You might also want to arrange the pivot table to show a
and clear examples of
more traditional timesheet layout, with days of the week
formulas, functions,
across the top:
pivot tables,
conditional
formatting, and
charts. Read more.

Each time you lter on a different week number, your

pivot table will build a new time sheet that displays the
dates that belong to the week.

Note that by adding a column for Name to the data, you

could track and report time for multiple people. You
could also add a rate column to the data and use a pivot
table to summarize the cost or billing rate of time logged.

If you want to learn more about pivot tables, see

Core Pivot.

User activity in a web portal

Imagine that you're given a data dump from a large

company's website. The website is a portal that provides
product information to partners. Partners sign-up on an
on-going basis throughout the year, and the portal has
been running for a long time. You open up the data and
take a look. Yikes. There are more than 30,000 users in
there! The data looks something like this:

Lots of user data. Emails are ctitious, of course!

Your boss wants to know some basic information: how

many users are currently active? How many users are
being created each month? What partners have the most
user accounts, and so on. Also, she's meeting for CEO at
lunch. Can you get that info to her in the next hour?
Gulp.
Before you panic and break out heavy-duty functions like
COUNTIF, SUMIF, INDEX, and so on, take a deep breath.
This kind of data is perfect for pivot tables, which will
crunch through it quickly and still leave you time for a
cup of coffee. First, active vs. inactive users. This kind of
summary is a piece of cake with pivot tables, even with
huge data sets:

Interesting. Some users are "suspended". Who knew?

Next, the top 10 partners by number of active users. This

is easily done by using the pivot tables built-in "Top 10"
value lter.

And nally, by grouping user creation dates by year and

month, you can easily show the complete history of user
creation:

There must have been an import back in December 2009.

Class list

In this example, you're helping to coordinate sign-ups for

a class that's offered Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Each day during the sign-up period, you get a set of data
that looks like this:
Note the data is formatted as a Table; important for
updating later

Your job is to send a simple report to the instructor at the

start of each day that shows current registrations. There's
not a lot of data here, but if you create the report
manually, you'll need to use some combination of
ltering, sorting, copying, and pasting, and you'll have to
repeat the process each day.

Once again, this is an easy job for a pivot table. Just build
a simple pivot table that summarizes by class day:

35 people have registered so far. Only 8 for the Friday class.

By adding names, you can quickly create a full class list.

By moving the Class eld into the column labels area,

you can create a report that keeps all students together
in alphabetical order.
One Pivot Table quirk is a tendency to want to count
everything.

Now that you've got a report layout you like, how do you
update the report each day? Simple. Just paste in the
latest data, overwriting the existing data, and refresh the
pivot table(s). Should take less than a minute, with no
busy work.

See also: Why should use a table for your Pivot table

Instrument measurements

You've got measurement data from a system that records

the temperature, relative humidity, and dew point in a
greenhouse every two minutes. The data looks like this:

What you need is a quick breakdown that shows the

average reading per hour. Yes, you could construct your
own formulas to do this, but it's going to be a lot of work.
By owing the data through a pivot table, you can simply
add each measurement as a value, and change the display
to show average instead of sum. This will give you a tidy
summary that shows the average of each reading by hour:
Average readings per hour in less that 5 minutes

Email signups

You're working with a client who is tracking email

signups on their website. The client is planning a new
marketing campaign and wants to know which day of the
week is best for signups, based on the data they have so
far. Day of week is a little tricky, since it doesn't appear
anywhere in the data, but you can easily add it to the
data using the WEEKDAY function. Your data now looks
like this:

And an initial summary looks like this:

Every email sign-up to date in one tidy little pivot table

Looking at the data, you realize it would be more useful

to show the total signups as a percentage rather than an
absolute number. By setting the email count to display a
percentage of row, the pivot table will show a breakdown
by day of week. In addition, you add conditional
formatting to make the higher and lower percentages
stand out. Green for higher percentages, blue for lower
percentages.

Now it's clear: most sign-ups are on weekdays. Tuesdays

and Wednesdays are especially good days.

Summary

Hopefully this short tour of "unconventional" pivot tables

tables has inspired you to try some new pivot tables on
your data. You don't need to have a huge set of data to
see the bene t of using a pivot table. Pivot tables will
save you time and energy any whenever need to create a
report based on data, especially a report you'll need to
update again in the future.

Already making useful pivot tables? Confused by pivot

tables? Feel free to comment below.

Want to know still more about pivot tables? See

Core Pivot.

See also 
23 things you should know about Excel pivot tables
Can pivot tables save your job?

Related courses 
Core Pivot

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