The other fantastic thing about a pivot table is that it is very easy to change the report. Let us say that you print this report and you take it to your Manager. And variably, the Manager is going to say, “Well wait a second; this is what I asked for but not exactly what I wanted. I want Products going down the left hand side and Regions going across the top.” It is very easy to change this in a pivot table. You want to take the Region field and move it from the row labels drop zone and drop it to the column labels drop zone. And then, we are going to take the Product field and move it from the column labels drop zone and drop it in the row label drop zone. Just that quickly, I have completely changed the complexion of the report. If you need to add new field to the pivot table, you can simply either check them in the top half of the pivot table field list or just drag them from the top half of the pivot table field list and drop them in the appropriate place. For example, let us say that we wanted to add customer to this report, there are two places along the left hand side where we can add the Customer field. We can show each Customer in column A and within that, the products that they have purchased. In order to do that, we would drop the customer field before the product field in the rows label area.

That is one view of our data. It also might make sense to show the product field first in column A and then show the customers who purchased that product. We would simply drag the customer field and drop it below the product field in the row labels area. Completely different report show that each product and the customers who purchased that product. Notice how easy it is to completely change the report simply by dragging fields throughout the report. If there is a field in the pivot table that you need to remove from the pivot table, fairly easy to remove it. You have two choices now in excel 2007. The easiest way is simply to uncheck the field in the top half of the field list. The other method is to grab the field from the bottom half of the field list and drag it back to the top. When the mouse pointer changes to a black X, you are about to remove the field from the pivot table report.