
#Tabular pivot table in excel software#
Using the example above, the software will find all distinct values for Region. In this case, the total number of units shipped is displayed here using a sum aggregation. These fields allow several kinds of aggregations, including: sum, average, standard deviation, count, etc. In this case, the column is ship date, the row is region and the data we would like to see is (sum of) units. The first question to ask is, "What am I seeking?" In the example here, let us ask, "How many Units did we sell in each Region for every Ship Date?":Ī pivot table usually consists of row, column and data (or fact) fields.

The usage of a pivot table is extremely broad and depends on the situation. A pivot table can help quickly summarize the data and highlight the desired information. While tables such as these can contain many data items, it can be difficult to get summarized information from them. Mechanics įor typical data entry and storage, data usually appear in flat tables, meaning that they consist of only columns and rows, as in the following portion of a sample spreadsheet showing data on shirt types: In 2007 Oracle Corporation made PIVOT and UNPIVOT operators available in Oracle Database 11g.

Excel 2000 introduced "Pivot Charts" to represent pivot-table data graphically.Excel 97 included a new and improved PivotTable Wizard, the ability to create calculated fields, and new pivot cache objects that allow developers to write Visual Basic for Applications macros to create and modify pivot tables.Microsoft further improved this feature in later versions of Excel: Early in 1994 Microsoft Excel 5 brought a new functionality called a "PivotTable" to market.
#Tabular pivot table in excel windows#
In 1993 the Microsoft Windows version of Improv appeared. Borland purchased the DataPivot technology in 1992 and implemented it in their own spreadsheet application, Quattro Pro. A few months after the release of Improv, Brio Technology published a standalone Macintosh implementation, called DataPivot (with technology eventually patented in 1999).

Lotus Development released Improv in 1991 on the NeXT platform. This core functionality would provide the model for pivot tables. With Improv, users could define and store sets of categories, then change views by dragging category names with the mouse. A tool that could help the user recognize these patterns would help to build advanced data models quickly. While working on a concept for a new program that would eventually become Lotus Improv, Salas noted that spreadsheets have patterns of data. In their book Pivot Table Data Crunching, Bill Jelen and Mike Alexander refer to Pito Salas as the "father of pivot tables". This summary might include sums, averages, or other statistics, which the pivot table groups together using a chosen aggregation function applied to the grouped values.Īlthough pivot table is a generic term, Microsoft held a trademark on the term in the United States from 1994 to 2020. For cross-tabulation that aggregates only by counting (rather than summing, averaging, etc.), see Contingency table.Ī pivot table is a table of grouped values that aggregates the individual items of a more extensive table (such as from a database, spreadsheet, or business intelligence program) within one or more discrete categories.
