Hello and welcome to A1 Excel! This post will go over how to use a regular pivot table as a summary table. The advantage of having a pivot table based on data with carefully curated formula parameters is that you can have it on hand as a monthly refresh report where all you have to do is insert your new monthly data and refresh the pivot table.
This is only useful if you are able to have a clean format in the pivot table. Sometimes pivot tables in the format that they are is not always the neatest for summaries or pasting into presentations. I will showcase how to format a pivot table in such a way that will be easy to refresh and utilize.
Example:
To set up a Pivot Table simply select the data you wish to include and click on the Pivot Table Icon:
For reference, I am choosing to have the Pivot Table in the same Worksheet for ease of use in this example but typically Pivot Tables are allocated to a New Worksheet in order to be a separate summary.
In this example I am pulling in amount of vet bills over the years by veterinarian. As you can see the summary is simple and clean but it is not quite polished enough to be used as a summary in a presentation or formal deliverable.
An easy way to reformat this Pivot Table is to select the Design section on the Excel menu. From here you can select a pre-made design under Pivot Table Designs as shown below:
From here you can hide row 13 and rename cell A14 to "Veterinarians" in order to have a neat summary that you can refresh with new data whenever needed.
Now if you need to have a specific color scheme per company guidelines for formal presentation you can play around with it here:
This section below can specify a Pivot Table Style for any section of a data table as described in the Table Elements section.
As you format each element you will select OK at the bottom of this menu to get back to the listing of elements for as much customization as needed.
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