 Welcome to TechSoup Tips. I'm Susan Hope Bard and I'm going to introduce you to the wonderful world of pivot tables for Excel 2013 and 2016. The pivot table really is the Jedi master of tools in Excel because it magically lets you turn large amounts of data into succinct interactive reports faster than pulling out your lightsaber. An added benefit is that creating the pivot table doesn't change anything in your original spreadsheet. That's right, no more monotonous manual sorting, filtering, formula-ing. But before you learn to amaze and miss down your friends, let's talk for a minute about when you would use a pivot table. In general, a pivot table is used to categorize, summarize, reorganize, or show connections within a data set or Excel spreadsheet. What does that mean to you? Well, let's use a scenario that you're an organization and you've just received a report on all of the donations that have come into your organization for two fiscal years. And that Excel file has 3,000 plus rows and a ton of columns. A lot of data. Well, with a pivot table, you can easily turn this data into a manageable report that you can make sense of quickly. So a couple of things. First, you want to make sure that you start with good, clean data fields. And these are your column headers. So let's look at the sample data for this tutorial. We have last name, first name, fiscal year, city, state, and donation amount. These are pretty clear. There aren't any commas or dashes in between. It's going to be easy for me to import into a pivot table. The next step is you're going to click on cell A1 and then go up to your menu, your insert menu. And the very first thing on your insert ribbon is pivot table. Click on it. What pops up next is a pivot table wizard. And this wizard is going to take you step by step into selecting the data you want to use. And then it'll take you to the next steps to selecting the fields you'd like to show. So Excel intuitively knew that I wanted to select all of the data in this particular spreadsheet. And you can see that by the dotted moving green line. And that's the raw data 2014 and 15. If I wanted to use other data from another source, here is where I could select it. For the purpose of this tutorial, we're just going to stick with this raw data. So I'm going to click OK. And a new sheet has been created. You can see on the left-hand side, this is where your pivot table will eventually be shown. And on the right-hand side, we have the pivot table fields. And remember that the pivot table fields are really your column headers. And we've determined that we'd like to show the donation amount. And I'm going to say we'd like to compare it by state. So there are two things I'm going to need to select here. State and donation amount. The rest of the fields I don't need to include in this particular pivot table. There are two ways you can select pivot table fields. You can check them. And you can see as I check them, Excel put it into rows. So each of the states represented in my report have a separate row. Or I could drag and drop. Click on state, drag it into rows, same outcome. And remember the other thing I wanted to compare are the total donation amounts by state. So I'm going to drag and drop this into the values column. Because Excel will then automatically or intuitively know that I'd like to sum that up. I'd like to sum up all the donations by state. And here I have each state. And then the total donations, the total sum of donations across that time frame. Really simple. But let's say you wanted to do something different. Like you wanted the average donation amount. Simple change. You go into your values column. Click on sum of donations. And then you have this pop-up field right here. Value field settings. Click on that. And another wizard will appear. This wizard is where you can change the type of calculation that you want to use to summarize the data from that particular field. And you can also identify the type of format you want for your number. So I'm just going to very quickly select average and click OK. So what happens is it changes from the total sum to the average of donation amount. So now you can compare across state an average donation amount. Pretty simple. Pivot tables really are fun to work with. We encourage you to try your own. That's it for now. And we appreciate you watching. Learn more about Microsoft product donations for your nonprofit or library at techsoup.org Microsoft.