A Complete Guide to PivotTables: A Visual Approach [Paperback]

Paul Cornell (Author)

Book Description

Series: Expert's Voice | Publication Date: November 5, 2004

Pivot Tables are powerful data analysis tools, yet most Excel users don't use them to their fullest potential. A Complete Guide to PivotTables shows you why Pivot Tables are so versatile for data analysis and how you can leverage Pivot Tables to rapidly spot trends and make fast business decisions on mountains of data. A series of step-by-step tutorials and plenty of sample business data will help you get productive with Pivot Tables quickly and easily.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Paul Cornell works at Microsoft on the documentation team for Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System. He worked as an editor, writer, and columnist on the MSDN Office Developer Center and edited the Microsoft Office Visual Basic Language Reference. Cornell also founded the Power User Corner, on Microsoft Office Online, where he was a frequent contributor.

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (November 5, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590594320
• ISBN-13: 978-1590594322
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #704,565 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Poorly written (and overpriced) explanation of pivot tables, February 28, 2005

By 

Dan Sherman (Alexandria, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Complete Guide to PivotTables: A Visual Approach (Paperback)

I bought this book after first beginning to use pivot tables and appreciating how easily they could be used to create and populate tables to present descriptive statistics. I had hoped that this book would show good examples of how to use pivot tables and further understand their features. This book really added very little to the basic understanding that I developed by simply experimenting with Excel and the various commands associated with pivot tables. It really has a low information-to-page ratio. Two much better resources on the topic are the website http://www.datapigtechnologies.com/ExcelMain.htm (really fine FREE online tutorials) or the book Excel Data Analysis: Your Visual Blueprint for Creating and Analyzing Data, Charts and PivotTables that provides quite a bit of information on pivot tables, along with a number of other topics in a much-better written book than this one.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars poorly edited and untested, rough going, August 27, 2005

By 

Stephen McHenry (Olney, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Complete Guide to PivotTables: A Visual Approach (Paperback)

I was familiar with Excel, knew nothing about pivot tables ( a really great tool for analyzing data from spreadsheets), but with a new job where people do use pivot tables I wanted a book to teach me and to keep as a desk reference. This book was very rough going in the beginning, frustrating, and unclear. It wasn't until I got past chapter 3 things started to clear up, in fact chapter 3 should have been chapter 1 as it explains the basics. Furthermore the author has a tendency to switch database examples in mid lesson so that it is very confusing while trying to follow along learning an aspect of pivot tables. The book should have been edited better, someone unfamiliar with pivot tables should have tried to learn from it before the book was sent to press. There are mistakes in the examples that can make one think one has screwed up somehow (listed as ascending but is descending, columns missing or with different data, the wrong name of a chart type so that reader is creating a different chart from the one shown). It did come with downloads to use as examples and by the time I was through it I had learned pivot tables. It could have been better done. I did not bother with the programming section so I cannot speak to that.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A well-researched tutorial on PivotTables, November 11, 2004

By 

R. Lodato "grey geek" (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Complete Guide to PivotTables: A Visual Approach (Paperback)

Like most people, I've only scratched the surface (well, maybe I gouged it a bit) of the capabilities of the Microsoft Office products. There are more features buried in them than most users ever discover. I use Microsoft Excel frequently in my job to analyze all sorts of data. When they came out with PivotTables, I dabbled in them and found several uses for them. However, documentation being what it is, I never really got to understand and utilize PivotTables to their full capabilities. Now, Apress has published A Complete Guide to PivotTables: A Visual Approach, by Paul Cornell.

If you have any need to analyze data in Excel, you must read this book. I learned so much more about PivotTables after I read it that they are now actually useful, rather than just being something I would occasionally try out. Every chapter is packed with excellent information in an easy-to-follow format. A beginning to intermediate user can understand most of the book. Only the chapter on programming PivotTables requires intermediate to advanced knowledge to fully comprehend.

Mr. Cornell takes a tutorial approach to explaining what PivotTables are, what they are capable of doing, and how you can apply them to your needs. Each chapter in A Complete Guide to PivotTables gives you an overview of the topic, a series of step-by-step examples, a "Try-It" section for more practice, and a summary of next steps. The book was written for Excel 2003, but most of the techniques can be applied to Excel 2002 and even Excel 2000.

Chapter 1 gives you the basic overview of the PivotTable feature, what it's meant to do, and why you would use it. Chapter 2 starts the in-depth training of building basic PivotTables from Excel Lists, external data sources, other PivotTables, etc. Chapter 3 goes even deeper with information on advanced settings, filters, calculated fields, and other little gems that make analysis easier. These three chapters complete your basic training and lead to chapter 4 "Using PivotTables in the Real World." Paul proceeds to give not just one, but three examples of how PivotTables could be used to provide insight into company operations.

Chapter 5 explains PivotCharts, which are simply a graphical representation of the information shown in a PivotTable. If you need to distill and analyze multidimensional, relational data, PivotTables are up to the task, as chapter 6 will demonstrate. The book describes how you use cube files, OLAP databases, and Microsoft Query to get the data and manipulate it. If you're a really capable programmer, comfortable with VBA, chapter 7 shows you how to work with PivotTable programmatically.

There is an appendix that describes the differences between Excel 2000, Excel 2002, and Excel 2003. I was originally reviewing this book while using a computer with Excel 2000. I was delighted to find out that most of the information in the book works exactly as Paul described (albeit the screen shots didn't match). I did recheck some of the examples on my other machine running Excel 2002, and had no problems at all.

As I said in the beginning, if you need to analyze data in Excel, get this book. You won't regret the investment. I give it a 5 out of 5.