Pivot Tables Made Easy

Casey McGuigan / Wednesday, May 9, 2018

If you don’t know what they are, how to use them, why they are useful, or what they even do, pivot tables can become scary and complex. You’ll soon find that a pivot table is a great way to quickly summarize, analyze, explore, and present your data.

ReportPlus, built by user experience experts, makes pivoting your data easy with an intuitive drag and drop experience. The pivot table is broken out into four sections: Values, Rows, Columns and Filters:

You will see that as you start dragging fields into a corresponding section that the data being displayed will instantly update. 

Values

This location is where you will drop your value field upon which you want your visualization to be built. By default, the field that you place in the values section will be summarized as a sum. If your field is a text field, ReportPlus will detect this and display your data as count.

You can see here that, by dragging Sales over to my values section, ReportPlus summarized my data:

If a value is all you wish to display, you can display your value in the form of a gauge. By clicking on the sales field, I am prompted with options to customize the value by changing the aggregation, formatting, sorting and filtering. You have these options and more in any field that you bring over.

Rows

This section is where you would drop the field that you want to correspond to the x-axes of your visualization. So, if I change my visualization to a column chart and drag a date field over to rows, you will see sales by month.

Columns

Regarding the columns section, here are the fields that you would have appear in your chart legend or the columns of a table, etc.

  

Filters

The filters section allows you to filter and slice your data based on a certain field. So, if I wanted to see sales by month per product, but I only wanted to see the deal types that were subscriptions, I would pull deal type over to the filters section. Then, I can click on the field to select which value(s) I want to filter by:  

To see how you can easily pivot your data in action with R+, check out this video. If you like the ease and functionality behind these pivot tables, consider taking a closer look at ReportPlus. It’s our answer to true self-service BI, allowing you to better visualize and understand your significant data for faster decision-making.