Were you tricked into believing that..

Pivot Table is an Advanced Excel function?

Pivot Table is the third function you should learn after Sort and Auto-filter.

A lot of Excel courses included Pivot Table only in their Advanced Level module or Masterclass. I can’t think of any good reason why you should be discouraged from using Pivot Table. It is simpler than VLOOKUP and with Pivot Table, you don’t have to know any worksheet functions to add or count. Pivot Table will do them for you.

In the video below, I am going to prepare a headcount report using Pivot Table. You judge for yourself whether it is a basic essential function or it should be a function only known to advanced Excel users.

The steps to create a Pivot Table are as follows:

Select a cell within your employee list
Go to the ribbon and click on the Insert tab.
Choose the first icon on the left. It says Pivot Table.
In the pop-up window, you should see the range being selected for you.
Choose new worksheet as the default option if you can. In the video, I select same worksheet to show give you a side by side comparison.
Drop the name into the Summation value box. The number of employees are counted.
Drop the Department into the Rows Value box. The previous number is now split into the respective departments.

Your headcount report is completed. Check out the video if you prefer a step-by-step demo.

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