This year has been the year of the pivot – so many people have had to pivot in their lives, both personal and professional. Pivot is defined as the action of turning around a point but of course in Excel it invariably means pivot table – which is basically a way to summarize your big fat juicy data sets into a summary that can fit on a page. I like to use the analogy of a car crusher to explain pivot tables (see this snippet from Breaking Bad to illustrate what a pivot table does – basically condenses your data.
However the piece that is usually left out of pivot table explanations is that you must have clean data i.e. data that is organised line by line (Normalised) and that’s not usually how data is presented e.g. data is often presented as months going left to right and headings on the left. Unfortunately that’s of no use to you if you need to restructure your pivot table. Fortunately it is now much easier to restructure your data in Excel using Power Query….I have two videos here that show you how to do it. The first video offers a straight forward scenario
In this second video – you can see a more complex example.
You can download the file I use here