Pivot Tables. This is a handout for you to keep. Please feel free to use it for taking notes.

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1 Class Description This is an introduction to using Pivot Tables in spreadsheets, focusing on Microsoft Excel. Attendees should have a good basic knowledge of spreadsheets. Class Length One and one half (1½) hours Pivot Tables Introduction Pivot Tables make analysis of a spreadsheet much easier than poring through countless rows of information, often with just a little bit of information on each row. Pivot Tables can aggregate information and show a new perspective with just a few clicks. They can be thought of as a summary table of the original spreadsheet. Objectives Learn how to create a Pivot Table from a spreadsheet s rows and columns Learn how to add and remove rows, and add and remove columns from a Pivot Table Learn how to change the calculations in a Pivot Table Learn how to quickly change formatting of a Pivot Table s figures This is a handout for you to keep. Please feel free to use it for taking notes. 1 *

2 Creating and Manipulating a Pivot Table Before creating a Pivot Table, you need data with which to work. Open the PivotTableWorksheet file from Documents. It contains fictitious information with the following fields: Voter Number (Voter Num) Precinct (Precinct) Age Group (Age Group) Last election in which a vote was cast (Last Voted) How many years they have been a registered voter (Years Registered) Ballot status (Ballot Status) Data comes first! Pivot Tables can only produce results as good as the raw data. Ensuring good data in the spreadsheet is essential. With just one of the cells with data active (selected) or with all the cells with data selected, switch to the INSERT ribbon and in the Tables group on the far left side of the ribbon, click the PivotTable icon. You should see the Create PivotTable dialog box as shown at left. For this exercise, it should have Sheet1!$A$1:$G$4001 in the Table/Range field. Although you can place the Pivot Table on the same worksheet, the default of creating a new worksheet is strongly recommended. Use this icon: to select a range of cells to be used for the Pivot Table. You can also enter the range to be used directly into the field. If configured, you can select Use an external data source. The checkbox next to Add this data to the Data Model is for adding multiple tables/ranges to a Pivot Table. We won t be using this feature. Click the OK button when ready. You should have a new worksheet created ( Sheet2 ), two temporary ribbons (PIVOTTABLE TOOLS ANALYZE and PIVOTTABLE TOOLS DESIGN) with the first one active, an area where the Pivot Table will be created on the left side of the worksheet and a panel on the right side labelled PivotTable Fields which, like all panels, can be dragged to a floating position (even outside the Excel window) or to the left side. 2 *

3 Although you can place checkmarks next to the fields you want to use in your Pivot Table, Microsoft Excel s guesses as to where you want to use it are frequently incorrect. It is usually easier to drag the field from the top section into the lower sections where you want the data to be. After dragging the Party field into the Columns section, the Precinct field into the Rows section, and the Voter Num field into the Values section, you should have something like this image. This opens the Value Field Settings dialog box (shown at left). Since we want a count of the voters instead of a total of their ID numbers, click on the Count option. This will change the Custom Name from Sum of VOTER NUM to Count of VOTE NUM. Microsoft Excel has guessed I want the Voter Num field treated as numbers to be added together! What we want is a count of the voters. This can be easily accomplished. Click the down pointing triangle to the right of the Sum of VOTE NUM. A menu of choices will open, click on Value Field Settings. Click the OK button. (The result is on the next page.) 3 *

4 Here is our first Pivot Table, showing the number of voters by party by precinct. One of the strengths of Pivot Tables is the ability to change the way information is presented. If we want to know the percentage of each party in each precinct, instead of just raw counts, we only need to right click on any of the values in the Pivot Table to open a context menu, move the mouse pointer to Show Values As to open its submenu, then move to % of Row Total and click on it. The result will be something like this: With this view, you can quickly identify the precinct where Republican voters are in the majority. If, instead of selecting % of Row Total, we select % of Column Total, we can see how much each precinct means to each party (next page). 4 *

5 Of course, politicians really care about actual votes, so right click in the region of percentages, move to the Show Values As to open its submenu, then click on No Calculation. (The Pivot Table should again be like the image at the top of the previous page.) What if we want to limit our look to those who voted in the previous two elections? This is where Filters are used. Drag the Last Voted field into the Filters section. contains the contents of the filter with a down pointing arrow for a drop down menu. Click on the arrow to open the menu: None of the numbers have changed, but cells A1 and B1 have gained information for filtering. Cell A1 contains the name of the field for filtering; cell B1 Since we want the last two elections, place a checkmark next to Select Multiple Items so we can select the items we want. Remove the checkmarks next to the elections in 2010 and 2012, then click the OK button. 5 *

6 The Pivot Table is updated with the filter just selected and applied. Additional filters can be added. After dragging the Age Group field into the Filters section, and then selecting ages above 51, we get this: Removing items from the Filters section or Columns section or Rows section or Values section is easy. Just drag it out of the section with the mouse and then release. 6 *

7 Using Conditional Formatting to Highlight Values Suppose the Republicans only have enough resources to target five precincts. They want to know which five precincts have had the most Republican voters the past two elections. They don t want to filter by age group. So we will drag the Age Group out of the Filters section. Next, select the cells in the Republican column for each of the 23 precincts (it should be cells F6 through F28). Then, switch to the HOME ribbon, find the Styles group, and click on Conditional Formatting, slide down to Top/Bottom Rules, then over to Top 10 Items. The Top 10 Items dialog box opens with the ten largest numbers highlighted (actually 12 items here because of a three way tie for 10 th place). Click on the down pointing arrow to the right of 10 five times to reduce the value to 5 (or click on the 10 and enter 5). As the number is reduced, the number of highlighted cells is reduced. If desired, change the color scheme with the drop down menu: You should see something like this; the highlighted cells clustered towards the bottom. Tip: Conditional formatting can be used anywhere in a spreadsheet it isn t limited to Pivot Tables. Questions? Feel free to contact Ross Valentine at rvalentine@gpld.org or call the library at March 2016