Hello, everyone, before I start speaking about pivot table and its various features, and the way to achieve them, I must make you aware about the prerequisites of pivot table. Well, the data that you're going to work with, you cannot just pick up any data and apply pivot table. And I've given some very basic examples to show you the differentiating factor between the data that you should be taking versus the data you cannot work with. Right now, I have a very simple data on the top left corner of my screen, which talks about chocolate ice cream, and in two years, what has been the sales amount? Well, this is not one dimensional data, this is not a columnar data, this actually based on two dimensions of variables. If you want to work with pivot table, you have to have columnar data or in other words, one dimensional data, which means you would have data which says chocolate 2008, and then the sales hundred so each one line item is an independent line item.
So if you have a data which looks like this You have got to convert this into this form before you apply pivot table and this pivot table which you apply based on the table number two is going to give you a lot many more flexible features which you can apply and make use of. Secondly, you must not have any header which is left blank. For example, if you keep this header blank, which may or may not be hidden, and if you go ahead and try to make a pivot table, eventually it stops you It gives an error message saying that this is not allowed you cannot have a header which is blank. The third point you cannot have a data which has more Excel for example, I have particularly ensured that this table number two, the header has a merged cell. And if I try to choose the entire block of data, notice the extra cell which is not merged also gets chosen.
So if I go ahead and say insert and pivot table, okay, yeah, same error. Why? Because this extra cells that got chosen is not having Any header. So, in simple words the three points that you need to take care of before you start preparing pivot table one it should be in columnar form. Secondly, it should have an header which is given with certain text or number but should not be left blank and third there should be no merge cell. So, once this prerequisites have been maintained, then we talked about pivot table.
See you in the next video.