When creating a pivot table in Microsoft Excel, it is good practice to begin by turning the Excel data into an Excel table. Using Excel's table feature has several benefits, including using column headers as filters, formulas propagating to all the cells in a column, and the option to add a total row. Another important benefit of working with an Excel table is that pivot tables based on the data can be refreshed when new rows or columns are added to the table; the user doesn't have to manually adjust the source data range to include the new data.
Let's open the first exercise file and create an Excel table.
Navigate to the folder where the exercise files were unzipped.
To open the exercise file,
Double-ClickPivotTable_Examples_Excel.xlsx
To make the Sales worksheet the active worksheet, if necessary, at the bottom of the Excel window,
Click the Sales worksheet tab
To move to the Insert tab, on the ribbon,
Click the Insert tab
To select a cell containing data, in the Sales worksheet,
Click any cell that contains data
To begin creating an Excel table, on the left side of the ribbon,
Click
The Create Table dialog box opens:
Excel has selected the range of cells adjacent to the selected cell as the data for the table. There is also an option to indicate whether or not the table has headers. Our table has headers in row 1, so we will leave this checkbox checked.
To create the table, in the dialog box,
Click
To deselect the table,
Click anywhere in the worksheet
The data in the AlumniDonors worksheet is now an Excel table:
By default, the Excel table is formatted with banded rows of blue and white. There are filtering and sorting options at the top of each column.
