 Hi folks, this is Dr. Don and I have a couple of short videos on pivot tables, but first what is a pivot table and why do you need one? A pivot table is a tool that allows you to organize and reorganize and summarize data in a spreadsheet without changing the original data. And it produces a report as well. You can also use pivot tables to find and select just the records you need for an in-depth analysis such as a test of a hypothesis. Especially when you have a lot of data, using pivot tables will allow you to quickly gain insights and answer questions without having to change your original data. Here is the data set we're going to be working with in this example. It is a portion of the total human resources database for fast technologies. And the IT folks have given us access to this table. In it, we have a list of employees over 9,000 of them. We're given some of their information including their name, their ID, their gender, their salary, their department, their title, etc. Let's say you need to make a report of the average salaries of men and women in each of the cities where FAST has a regional office and your boss is interested in just a few of the many departments FAST has in its worldwide organization. So you dig into the data and create this report. You can see each of the offices are listed and here are the four departments that your boss is interested in. And we have the salaries and the headcount for men and women in each of the offices as well as the total average salary for the men and women in that office and each of the departments in each of these offices. Pretty nice report. But then your boss looks at it and says, is this all the employees or just full-time employees? And you say, oh. And she says, I need to see just full-time employees. No worries you say. You go back to the pivot table you use and a few seconds you produce the updated report. Okay, here is the pivot table I use to create the report. All I have to do is to go up here under the assignment category filter which is now set to all, click on the drop-down and I'm going to change the all setting to just full-time regular and click okay. And you can see that the pivot table has updated down from over 2,000 employees to just 1,900 and if we go back to the report you can see the report is updated as well reflecting that we have just 1,917 full-time employees. That's pretty neat. You can imagine how long that would have taken if you had to manually go back into the original data, cut and paste and reorganize. Pivot tables are pretty powerful so in the next video I'm going to show you how to create this pivot table and I think you will benefit from learning it.