Chapter 3. Pivot Tables – The Basic Building Blocks

Pivot tables are the basic building blocks of analysis in Excel. The same concept of establishing the pivot table elements, that is, Rows (required), Values (required), Columns (optional), and Filters (optional), are used within most of the Microsoft-reporting tools. Very often, I am asked how someone can make a pivot table look like a report and not like a table. With a few clicks of the mouse, your pivot table can become a professional, easy-to-read report.

At their most complex, these tables provide infinite ways to analyze and visualize data. We can't fit an infinite number of ways in this book, so we'll use some common scenarios here.

In this chapter, we will start building our Dynamics GP dashboard by learning about:

• Creating pivot tables from GP 2016 Excel report data
• Creating pivot tables from GP 2016 data connections
• Copying pivot tables
• Creating connected pivot tables from Excel

In the next few of chapters of this book, we will build a dashboard that looks like the one in the following screenshot, and we will use pivot tables as the foundation:

Note

The term "pivot table" is generic. Microsoft has trademarked the term "PivotTable," so you'll use the items in Excel labeled that way.