Summary

Excel's sorting, filtering, and table features make the tasks of ordering and tracking down information from your data easy. But the techniques discussed so far may not answer all the questions you'd like to ask of your data. For example, what if you want to learn the average salary of your employees not across the whole company, but broken out by department? Or what if you need to know how much money each salesperson has earned per month? Or how much money you spend per month by budget category? Or perhaps you need to determine university students' grade point averages by their major. In the next chapter we're going to explore a powerful Excel feature that will help you with these questions and more: pivot tables.