From the course: Excel PivotTables: Mastering PivotTables and PivotCharts

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Calculations in PivotTables vs. source data

Calculations in PivotTables vs. source data - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Excel PivotTables: Mastering PivotTables and PivotCharts

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Calculations in PivotTables vs. source data

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- [Instructor] Alright, so in the last lecture I shared with you guys a pro tip that basically said never calculate rates or rate metrics in your raw data itself and to instead make those calculations using PivotTable calculated fields. Now it's a bit of a nuanced point but it's an important one and I think it's worth digging into a little bit more. So let me give you guys a demonstration of why this is so important and what the implications are of taking each approach. So in this case we already calculated a field called ROI which is calculated as the revenue divided by the budget. Now that's a good example of a rate metric. So had I instead gone into my raw data and inserted a brand new column here and insert it right after Q and call it ROI raw, I could just calculate that right in here as column Q divided by S, which is budget, and apply that down. And I don't want to mess up the formatting so I can go into the auto fill options, fill without formatting, and I can just turn that…

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