Google Sheets is a web app that allows users to analyze data and is a great free alternative to programs like Excel.
A pivot table summarizes the data from another table by performing some kind of manipulation on the original data (such as summing, counting, or averaging), and then groups the summarized data in a useful way. That definition was probably not terribly helpful – I wrote it, and I’m still confused myself. Instead of trying to define it, let’s create a data table and then build a pivot table based on it, so that we can more clearly understand how this concept works.
So we would like to create a table of how much money each house sold for. Here’s our table (obviously just a short version, a real table would have a lot more data but let’s keep it simple):
We could do it by hand, and it would be easy for this little table, but imagine if we had hundreds of sales to look at. So how do we easily turn this sales information into a useful pivot table that will show us the average sales price by neighborhood?
Google Sheets will now show the corresponding data in the pivot table. You can select any kind of data set you like and create results as Grand Totals. You can compare instances, values, how many times a value appears, SUMs, and more, all by selecting the type of report in the right pane. Just click inside the pivot table to bring up the reporting pane, and play with the values there, and you can see all the different ways that you can configure your tables. We can easily make this table show us the minimum or maximum sales price in a neighborhood, or how many houses sold per neighborhood, or any of a number of other ways to visualize the data.
Pivot tables help you summarize and analyze large data sets by displaying the information in more digestible formats. They make it much easier to take out small pieces of information and conclusions from a large set of information.
A pivot table summarizes the data from another table by performing some kind of manipulation on the original data (such as summing, counting, or averaging), and then groups the summarized data in a useful way. That definition was probably not terribly helpful – I wrote it, and I’m still confused myself. Instead of trying to define it, let’s create a data table and then build a pivot table based on it, so that we can more clearly understand how this concept works.
So we would like to create a table of how much money each house sold for. Here’s our table (obviously just a short version, a real table would have a lot more data but let’s keep it simple):
We could do it by hand, and it would be easy for this little table, but imagine if we had hundreds of sales to look at. So how do we easily turn this sales information into a useful pivot table that will show us the average sales price by neighborhood?
How to Create a Pivot Table in Google Sheets
- Select all the data (including the headers) by selecting the corner cell or pressing Ctrl + A.
- Select Data and then Pivot tables from the menu.
- Google Sheets will create a new sheet with a blank grid.
- Select which rows, columns, values and filters to use from the right menu. Note that Sheets suggests a pre-made table for us – in fact, it’s exactly what we want! Select “Average of Sale Price for Each Neighborhood”.
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