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"Geez - this week's forum is almost tailor made for me it seems. I use and create pivot tables almost daily.

Three uses:

1: Quickly sort and cross tabulate large amounts of data.

2: Filter large (or small) data sets based on certain criteria.

3: Quickly create sums, counts, totals, or other calculated fields for data sets.

When setting up a pivot table, the basic rule of thumb is that the data needs to be structured so that the values of the same type all need to be in one column. Typically, when creating a pivot table, you want the data to be sorted by columns, with the records being in rows. The column headers will represent the data category, with the individual records being in row format.

Often though, data is not presented to us in this fashion and we must reformat the data into a structure that is suitable for pivot tables. There are multiple ways to do this. You can use the switch columns & rows function, you can set up formulas using the index function, and you can also use add ins as well."