I never really understood pivot tables. In fact, for this blog entry I had to search for a definition. Wikipedia suggests: “A pivot table is a data summarization tool”.
I have a better understanding now as during the weekend I wanted to do some data analysis. The problem was that the data was not able to be produced in the same report, so I ended up with two reports with some common data. I had two options – manual data entry and calculations, or learning more about PowerPivot, a new data analysis add-on for Excel 2010.
Microsoft has put a number of videos on the PowerPivot website so that you can learn more and hands-on labs to try it out. I suggest you have a look at these. The tool is available to download as part of your Beta evaluation of Office 2010.
I was pleasantly surprised that it worked as advertised. I was able to create relationships between the data, summarise it in a Pivot Table, and find some interesting insights in the data.