With a pivot table, you can configure each column to give you the column's percentage of all three column totals, instead of just the column total. But what if you wanted to find the percentage these product sales contributed to all company sales, rather than just those products' sales totals? The table would automatically give you three totals at the bottom of each column - having added up each product's quarterly sales. Let's say you entered quarterly sales numbers for three separate products into an Excel sheet and turned this data into a pivot table. But that's not the only figure you can automatically produce. Pivot tables naturally show the totals of each row or column when you create them. Showing product sales as percentages of total sales. Using a pivot table, you can automatically aggregate all of the sales figures for product 1, product 2, and product 3 - and calculate their respective sums - in less than a minute. Manually sorting through them all could take a lifetime. Now, imagine your monthly sales worksheet has thousands and thousands of rows. You could then do the same for product 2, and product 3 until you have totals for all of them. You could, of course, look through the worksheet and manually add the corresponding sales figure to a running total every time product 1 appears. Say you have a worksheet that contains monthly sales data for three different products - product 1, product 2, and product 3 - and you want to figure out which of the three has been bringing in the most bucks. Comparing sales totals of different products. Here are seven hypothetical scenarios where a pivot table could be a solution: 1. They can be used to better understand, display, and analyze numerical data in detail - and can help identify and answer unanticipated questions surrounding it. The purpose of pivot tables is to offer user-friendly ways to quickly summarize large amounts of data. This is one of those technologies that are much easier to understand once you've seen it in action. If you're still feeling a bit confused about what pivot tables actually do, don't worry.

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