Pivot Tables

PIvot Table

You may be asking yourself why I have a picture of turn table on my blog. Well, 'turn' is analogous to 'pivot' and hence, 'Pivot Table'. Plus, searching for a pretty 'pivot table' was just not happening.

Only recently, I'd say within the past couple of years, have I noticed that when i want to export a spreadsheet, I had 2 options. The first was to export as a table, and the second was to export as a pivot table. Now, I had never heard of a pivot table nor knew what it did. And since no one had ever asked me to utilize it for anything, I had thought that maybe it was a legacy table, left over from the relics of non-GUI based software interfaces.

Then at my last job interview, the interviewer asks me if I knew how to use a pivot table! Wow, someone is asking me about this ancient technology left over from the days of the Great Pyramids! I was excited. I had to answer honestly and declined that I knew anything about pivot tables, but I said I was willing to learn. All interviewers love hearing about wanting to overcome your shortcomings. As I started working, I only utilized the standard tables. I was never asked again about the pivot table or was ever taught how to use it. But they would send out weekly statistics to the team. The information was overwhelming. We always thought to ourselves, 'how do they have the time to run all these reports and number?'

So one day, I'm sitting in our Database Management course and the pivot tables comes up again. Huh, this is interesting, we're gonna talk about pivot tables. Maybe we're taking a stroll down memory lane like in our Software Development course when we talked about the Turing Machine. Boy was I wrong, the pivot table isn't old and it is definitely not outdate. Not only was I wrong about how old it was, I was also wrong about the power behind it. I suddenly had an epiphany about my team leads as work. They were using pivot tables to run all those statics! And it didn't take them all day, using a pivot table allowed them to do it in minutes! I was flabbergasted, for lack of a better word.

Pivot tables are an extension of the standard spreadsheet that is capable of displaying the summarization of the data sets contained within the spreadsheet. The name comes from the ability to pivot the different data sets on the summary table and it's power seems to be limitless. Well, I may be overselling at this point. I've only used it for a couple of days now but the hidden potential isn't lost upon me. You can learn more from Oreilly.