ICT Skills for Teachers

Create a pivot table (Advanced level)

As an educator, your class could have conducted a survey while on a field trip or doing a science experiment. The data is descriptive data which can be interpreted in many different ways. You have already entered data in a spreadsheet, and would like them to analyse this data in a dynamic and flexible manner by means of a pivot table in Microsoft Excel.

By the end of this task you could achieve the following outcomes:

- Analyse and manipulate text and numeric data in a dynamic way
- Create a graph which allows you to represent your data visually in a dynamic way

Create your own pivot table - one which you will find useful. Alternatively, follow this example. To do so you would typically work through the following steps:

1.	Start Microsoft Excel. See how »
2.	Enter data: Insert the data which your class has obtained from their research. Give each column a heading, and make sure there are no blank rows or columns in between your data. See how »
3.	Create a pivot table: Use your data to create a pivot table on a new sheet. See how »
4.	Select a field to count: Choose one of your variables (generated from the column headings) to count; this should be a text item, not a number.
5.	Select a first field to divide up your data.
6.	Select a second field to divide up your data further.
7.	Select a numeric field with which to work.
8.	Create a pivot chart: Create a chart, and experiment with different kinds of chart, and dragging the fields to sgraph different fields. See how »
9.	Save the worksheet. See how »

Related scenarios

» Create a simple chart
» Sort data in Microsoft Excel
» Import a chart into Microsoft Word