Chapter 5 – Tables and PivotTables

Until now in this text we have dealt with small amounts of data. However, the more common situation in businesses today is having very large data sets to manipulate and make sense of. For example, large amounts of data can come from Access databases, data mining on the web, exporting from an accounting program, or many other places. The data can be thousands upon thousands of rows of raw data. How can we efficiently manipulate that kind of overwhelming data? In this chapter, we will explore the built-in tools in Excel that allow us to easily manipulate large data sets. Excel will easily condense, sort, filter, and subtotal data. Using PivotTables and PivotCharts we will see the power of Excel to condense raw data into easily manipulated reports.