Pivot Tables: the Basics and Beyond

What is the course about?

The course will address the essentials of pivot table construction, enabling the learner to develop the skills for devising their own tables.

Participants who will attend the full course will receive a City Lit certificate of attendance electronically for their CV or CPD records. The certificate will show your name, course title and dates of the course you have attended.

You can choose to attend this course either live online or in person.
- Internet connection. The classes work best with Chrome.
- A computer with microphone and camera.
- Earphones/headphones/speakers.
We will contact you with joining instructions before your course starts.

What will we cover?

• What pivot tables do
• The founding principles for building and understanding pivot tables
• How to move fields in the tables
• Applying different mathematical operations (e.g. Sum, Average, Max, Min) to the data
• Formatting pivot table results
• Grouping pivot table data
• Refreshing the pivot table to update its results after new records are added to the dataset
• Filtering pivot table data.
• “Unpivoting” a dataset: how to organize data before they reach the pivot table
• Grouping data and rounding them off: possible pitfalls
• Why grouping data in one pivot table groups them in others in the same workbook (whether you want that to happen or not), along with a workaround
• Relational pivot table queries
• Issues in data integrity: repairing defective records
• Calculated fields – when do you need one?
• Generating a count of unique records in a data set
• Pivot tabling Access and XML data.

What will I achieve?
By the end of this course you should be able to...

Construct usable pivot tables, learn how to modify them, and resolve a range of issues you may encounter in the course of devising them.

What level is the course and do I need any particular skills?

You should be comfortable with Excel at intermediate level.

How will I be taught, and will there be any work outside the class?

The class will be conducted via the hybrid mode, in which learners can appear in person or access the class via Zoom. No outside assignments will be issued.

Are there any other costs? Is there anything I need to bring?

No additional costs are required, nor do you need to bring any additional materials. If you access the class via Zoom you need Excel, preferably the 365 version, though earlier versions should be sufficient.

When I've finished, what course can I do next?

Please click here to view our Microsoft 365 courses.