A Complete Guide to PivotTables: A Visual Approach

— Thomas Duff, Duffbert's Random Musings

PivotTables are powerful data analysis tools, yet most Excel users don't use them to their fullest potential. A Complete Guide to PivotTables: A Visual Approach shows you why PivotTables are so versatile for data analysis and how you can leverage PivotTables to rapidly spot trends and make fast business decisions on mountains of data.

A series of step-by-step tutorials and plenty of sample business data will help you get productive with PivotTables quickly and easily. Whereas most books only devote a small section to PivotTables, this book covers everything about this important Excel feature. With his tremendous experience writing about Office and Excel for Power Users, Paul Cornell will teach you plenty about PivotTables.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Good book for beginners, 2007-01-25
If you are an excel or access user who does not make use just yet of pivot tables and charts, this book is for you. It explains at a very basic level how to use pivot tables. Why is a matter of what you do and your math and imagination abilities.

I recommend it for people who do not use them, because many people are still unfamiliar with the power of these tools and they truly are powerful and time savers.

Power users purchase this book expecting too much for their level, I believe, so stick to it if you don't even know what they are or do not use them at all for your data analysis.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Great for Beginners, 2006-09-20
If you just have a basic understanding of Excel, like I do, this is an excellent guide. Very understandable for non-technical types. Gives you step-by-step instructions. If you are an expert programmer, this book is probably not for you. I thought the screen shots and demo data was particularly helpful in understanding the basics of how to use Pivot tables. Of course, like anything else, you have to apply your own practical experience to it.


3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

Pivot Tables for Dummies, 2005-12-19
Save yourself time and money. If you know the fundamentals of pivot tables and like to learn by playing your time would be best spent experimenting in excel. The book spends much of its space telling you things you should be able to deduce by looking at the excel menus.


6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

poorly edited and untested, rough going, 2005-08-27
I was familiar with Excel, knew nothing about pivot tables ( a really great tool for analyzing data from spreadsheets), but with a new job where people do use pivot tables I wanted a book to teach me and to keep as a desk reference. This book was very rough going in the beginning, frustrating, and unclear. It wasn't until I got past chapter 3 things started to clear up, in fact chapter 3 should have been chapter 1 as it explains the basics. Furthermore the author has a tendency to switch database examples in mid lesson so that it is very confusing while trying to follow along learning an aspect of pivot tables. The book should have been edited better, someone unfamiliar with pivot tables should have tried to learn from it before the book was sent to press. There are mistakes in the examples that can make one think one has screwed up somehow (listed as ascending but is descending, columns missing or with different data, the wrong name of a chart type so that reader is creating a different chart from the one shown). It did come with downloads to use as examples and by the time I was through it I had learned pivot tables. It could have been better done. I did not bother with the programming section so I cannot speak to that.


6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

Very Disappointing; Nothing New Here, 2005-05-11
As an intermediate user, I found nothing new here. I must agree with the other reviews here that state that this book seems rushed. There was not alot of time spent on each aspect of pivot tables, and the examples provide no new information that you can't find on the web. May be good for beginners, but again, just do Google search on pivot tables an you'll find the same info.

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