Microsoft Office

Part V
Analyzing Data with Excel
FIGURE 35.4
Pivot tables with options for subtotals and grand totals.
Automatic grouping examples
When a field contains numbers, dates, or times, Excel can create groups automatically. The two examples in
this section demonstrate automatic grouping.
Grouping by date
Figure 35.5 shows a portion of a simple table with two fields: Date and Sales. This table has 730 rows and
covers the dates between January 1, 2005, and December 31, 2006. The goal is to summarize the sales
information by month.
ON the CD-ROM
A workbook demonstrating how to group pivot table items by date is available on the companion
CD-ROM. The file is named sales by date.xlsx.
Figure 35.6 shows part of a pivot table created from the data. The Date field is in the Row Labels section
and the Sales field is in the Values section. Not surprisingly, the pivot table looks exactly like the input data
because the dates have not been grouped.
To group the items by month, select any date and choose PivotTable Tools ➪ Options ➪ Group ➪ Group
Field (or, right-click and choose Group from the shortcut menu). You see the Grouping dialog box, shown
in Figure 35.7.
In the By list box, select Months and Years and verify that the starting and ending dates are correct. Click
OK. The Date items in the pivot table are grouped by years and by months, as shown in Figure 35.8.
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