Pivot Tables - One of Excel's Most Powerful Tools

I won't try and hide the fact from you that I am a big fan of Pivot Tables. I use them a lot in the development of Spreadsheets for my clients. Once the client sees the Pivot Table, they nearly always ask "could I do that?" the answer of course is yes! Unfortunately most people tend to shy away from Pivot Tables, as they see them as too complex. to be honest with you, when you first use a Pivot Table the whole thing can seem a bit daunting. Don't be put off by this as persistence will almost certainly pay off. I find the best part about Pivot Tables is their ability to be manipulated via 'Trial-and-Error' and immediately show the result. If its' not what you expect, simply use the Undo feature and/or have another go! What you must always remember is that you are not changing the structure of your original table in any way at all, so you can do no harm!

What would we use them for?
We would use a Pivot Table to produce meaningful information from a table of information. Imagine you have a table of data that contains names, addresses, ages, occupations, phone numbers, postcodes etc. With a Pivot Table we could very easily and quickly find out:
1. How many people have the same names.
2. How many postcodes are the same.
3. A count of a particular occupation.
4. See only people that match a particular occupation.
5. Find out the addresses of people that match a postcode

In fact the list can go on and on!

What is the advantage ?
Perhaps the biggest advantage to using Pivot Tables is the fact that we can generate and extract meaningful information from a large table of information within a matter of minutes. Or perhaps it is because they will not use up a lot of memory from your PC. In a lot of cases we could get the same results from a table of data by using Excels built in functions, but this would take more time and use far more memory. On top of this, if we wanted some new information we can simply drag-and-drop (pivot). We can also opt to have our information update each time we open the Workbook and/or by clicking refresh.