I have to hand it over to Microsoft for creating excel and helping businesses everywhere sort their data points. Today, almost every business uses Microsoft applications. Even if you have a MacBook, chance are you have purchased the Microsoft products. There is a good reason behind it. Excel is an extraordinary application that allows you to SUM up numbers, create averages, create visual representations of your data points, and, most importantly, helps you sort through thousands and thousands of data points.
If you have hundreds, thousands or even a million data points, excel workbook xls has a limit of 65,536 rows and 256 columns. However, the workbook xlsx and xlsm have a limit of 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns, which allows you to add all your data and then sort by it.
Pivot Tables becomes your best friend and go-to tool to see what all that data is telling you.
I will show you how to create pivot tables in 5 easy steps:
Step 1
Have your file with all the data open.
Step 2
Select any box inside your data point
Step 3
Under Insert in the menu box, you are going to press the Pivot Table button
Step 4
Proceed to click OK
Note: Because you have a box selected within your data, excel is going to select all the data for you automatically. You will not need to highlight any rows or columns. But in order for this to work, you have to have a box selected in your data.
Note how the entire workout where the numbers are located get highlighted with a green dotted line around the data.
Step 5
Select your data
You will notice how, on the right-hand side, you have four fields to create a pivot table.
Filters
Columns
Rows
Value
Under the field name box, you can now drag your components into different sections. It all depends on how you want to see your data points.
In this screenshot, you can see how all the data are sorted for you in a table.
Pivot tables are beneficial, and I highly recommend that you use this succession tip for your data analysis.