This guide will show you how to create a basic pivot table in Google Sheets.
Create a pivot table in Google Sheets
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Access your dataset. In this case, I'm looking at sales data for North America. Most customers bought multiple products so there are multiple rows of data for each, but I want to see the total spend by customer for the year.
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I want to see the total spend by customer for the year. The first steps is to highlight the dataset I want to analyze and click "Data".
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Select "Pivot table".
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Click "Create".
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Put the data you want to analyze as a "row". Doing this will allow you to look at different variables for that data. In this case, I want to see spend by customer. So the "Customer" will be my row.
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Select the value you want to analyze and place that under "values". In this case, I want to see the total spend by customer so I select "Price" and place it under "Values".
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The pivot table then sums the total spend by customer for me. Voila!
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Change the operation in a pivot table in Google Sheets
By default, pivot tables will "sum" the values, but you can always change the formula. For example, I could look at Max spend. Here's how.
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Under the variable you're analyzing, select "Summarize by"
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Choose the operation you want to use.
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The pivot table automatically updates to reflect your changes. Woo!
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