10 Ways Excel Pivot Tables Can Increase Your Productivity
When I first started to learn how to use Excel Pivot Tables, I’m not going to lie, I was a little intimidated. At the time I really wasn’t certain about how and why I should be using them to analyze and summarize my data. Because I was a newbie I analyzed my data by literally manually selecting the cells that I wanted to summarize in combination with simple formulas like SUM and AVERAGE. At this point I was still unaware that the majority of the manual interaction with my data set could be eliminated with formulas like SUMIF and AVERAGEIF. I completely skipped over learning the SUMIF/SUMIFS and AVERAGEIF/AVERAGEIFS formulas and went right into learning pivot tables. I think it was because I was always intrigued and excited about learning an entirely new concept/application within Excel. Once you start to learn how to use pivot tables you’ll realize that all of the manual work is completely removed and you’ll notice your productivity sky rocket. I am going to show you 10 productivity hacks that can be applied to Pivot Tables in Excel 2010 / 2013 and definitely most can also be applied to earlier versions of Excel as well (one of the features may only be applied to Excel pivot tables 2013). (more…)