In the following Skills Review, you will create a new Excel worksheet with a cha

Question

In the following Skills Review, you will create a new Excel worksheet with a chart that summarizes the first quarter sales of fitness equipment for step training. Your completed worksheet will look similar to Figure 1.56. PROJECT FILES For Project 1C, you will need the following file: New blank Excel workbook You will save your workbook as: Lastname_Firstname_1C_Step_Sales CHAPTER REVIEW Skills Review Project 1C Step Sales le the following Skls Review, you will create a new Excel wocksbeet wh a chart the summarines the fint quarter sales of fitness equipmens for siep training. Your completed worksheet will look simelar to Figure 1.56 Data ina PROJECT FILES t capFor Project 1C, you will needt the following New blank Excel workbook You wal save your workbook as Calun Chartn PROJECT RESULTS RIGURE 1.54 Project 1C Shep Sales continues on the next page 400 Excel Chapter 1:CREATING A WORKSHEET AND CHARTING DATA

Explanation / Answer

Use Cases for Pivot Tables

If you are still feeling a bit confused about what a pivot table actually does, don't worry. This is one of those technologies that's much easier to understand once you've seen it in action. So, here are two hypothetical scenarios where you'd want to use a pivot table.

Scenario #1: Comparing Sales Totals of Different Products

Say you have a worksheet that contains monthly sales data for three different products -- product 1, product 2, and product 3 -- and you want to figure out which of the three has been bringing in the most bucks. You could, of course, look through the worksheet and manually add the corresponding sales figure to a running total every time product 1 appears. You could then do the same for product 2, and product 3, until you have totals for all of them. Piece of cake, right?

Now, imagine that monthly sales worksheet of yours has thousands and thousands of rows. Manually sorting through them all could take a lifetime. Using a pivot table, you can automatically aggregate all of the sales figures for product 1, product 2, and product 3 -- and calculate their respective sums -- in less than a minute.

Scenario #2: Combining Duplicate Data

In this scenario, you've just completed a blog redesign and had to update a bunch of URLs. Unfortunately, your blog reporting software didn't handle it very well, and ended up splitting the "view" metrics for single posts between two different URLs. So in your spreadsheet, you have two separate instances of each individual blog post. In order to get accurate data, you need to combine the view totals for each of these duplicates.

That's where the pivot table comes into play. Instead of having to manually search for and combine all the metrics from the duplicates, you can summarize your data (via pivot table) by blog post title, and voilà: the view metrics from those duplicate posts will be aggregated automatically.

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