Your Manager Wants Your Report Changed

November 18, 2022 - by Bill Jelen

Problem: I presented my first pivot table report, shown previously, to my manager. He said, “This is almost perfect, but could you have the products going across the top and the regions going down the side?”

Strategy: Pivot tables make this change easy:

1. On the worksheet, select one cell within the pivot table. Excel will display the PivotTable Field List dialog.
2. In the dialog, drag the Region field from the Column Labels drop zone to the Row Labels drop zone. In this case, it does not matter if you drop the Region field above or below the Product field
3. In the dialog, drag the Product field from the Row Labels drop zone to the Column Labels drop zone.

Results: With two movements of the mouse, you have created a new report for your manager.

Drag Product from Rows to Columns and Region from Columns to Rows. You now have a report with Regions down the side and products across the top. This action is why they call it a "Pivot" table. — Figure 824. Move two fields to create a new report.

The first amazing feature of pivot tables is that they can summarize massive amounts of data very quickly. This topic shows the second amazing feature: Pivot tables can be quickly changed to show another view of the data.

This article is an excerpt from Power Excel With MrExcel

Title photo by Ellen Qin on Unsplash