Beginner’s Guide to Pivot Tables in Excel for Financial Reports

 Introduction

Pivot tables are one of the most powerful functions in Microsoft Excel used in organizing and analyzing data. In financial reporting, it is particularly more useful as the user can summarize, filter, and visualize large datasets without changing the underlying data. Learn how to create insightful financial reports with pivot tables in this beginner’s guide.

 

Pivot Table 

A pivot table is that statistical tool for summarizing and reorganizing the data columns and rows of your selected spreadsheet or database tables in order to receive a needed report. This tool will not change the spreadsheet or database themselves; it will only pivot or turn your data views in different angles.

Pivot tables are extremely useful especially when the size of data is huge in quantity, which means way too time-consuming to do that calculation manually. Among very few data processing functions which a pivot table can undertake, it includes sum identification, average identification, identifying ranges or outliers, and so on. The information is arranged in such an easy and meaningful layout such that the table draws attention with key values.

 

How to Use a Pivot Table

Step 1: Organize the Data

To make a dynamic table work well, your data needs to be highly organized so that you easily transform it into such. This means that you want to ensure that data you input is in rows and columns properly. If this were not the case, it means that the table was going to malfunction when executed. Ensure that category (category names) goes at the top row of your dataset, as you shall see in the next screen.

Step 2: Insert the Pivot Table

Click on the data you wish to be placed in the table followed by, on the Excel ribbon, clicking the Insert Tab followed by the tables Group, then pivot table, as shown below:

 

When you get a dialog box ensure that appropriate data have been selected; then click ok to ascertain whether to have the table appear in its new worksheet form, or within the framework of an already existing work sheet-this depends on how you’d prefer it.

 

Step 3: Setup the Pivot Table

Once you have completed step two, you should see the “PivotTable Fields” box.  Here you now set your fields.  You can do this by dragging and dropping options as they are listed there.  Or you make use of the tick boxes to select what you wish to view in the table.

Step 4: Sort the Table

That said, now that you set up a basic pivot table, you can sort it out by multiple criteria in detail, such as name and value and count and a number of other things as well.

To sort on date, click on this auto sort button in this image below, and pick more sort options to let the program choose from so many criteria you can possibly sort by.

You can click any spot in the table to the right click on and go to Sort then to more sort options.

Step 5: Filter the Data 

It adds a filter as one great way of sorting data easily.  In the above example, we demonstrated how to sort; now, with the help of the filter function, we can click the button and get data in a particular subsection.

Look how, by dragging the “channel” category from the list of options down into the Filters section, a new box suddenly pops open at the top of the pivot table with the text saying “channel”, which then shows that the filter is indeed added.

 

Next, we are able to click on the filter button and then chose any filters that we so desire as shown below.

 

Step 6: Edit the data values

By default, an Excel pivot table only provides the sum of whatever’s being shown in the table. In this table we are showing the sum of all revenues by category and the sum of all shipping expenses by category and on and on.

We now have a different presentation. We change from sum of all revenues to count of all revenue that can allow us to calculate the number of items sold. That is helpful in case it can be reported. The step we can follow will include a right click on data, and we click the command value field settings where an opening box like one displayed below appears.

 

Step 7: Adding an extra dimension to the Pivot Table

We are at this point only just beginning to see one row category and one column category (the values).  We may, however need to add an extra dimension.  A quick word of warning, however, that this could potentially make your table much bigger.

Click the table to open up the box “fields.” Then pull down an extra category and drag it into the “columns” box labeled as “dates.” Each heading will then break into as many columns as dates you have in the data set.

 

Conclusion

Mastering pivot tables in Excel gives the user the power to analyze finances effectively. Through this tutorial, users can make complicated datasets easier to understand and customize reports to highlight the most important metrics. Pivot tables take raw data and organize it into actionable insights that users can use to make confident data-driven financial decisions.