From the course: Excel PivotTables: Mastering PivotTables and PivotCharts

Unlock the full course today

Join today to access over 22,600 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.

How PivotTables actually work, part 2

How PivotTables actually work, part 2 - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Excel PivotTables: Mastering PivotTables and PivotCharts

Start my 1-month free trial

How PivotTables actually work, part 2

“

- [Instructor] So to wrap up this Pivot Table 101 section, I wanted to include one lecture to talk about how pivot tables are actually working. So in other words when you pull back that curtain, what exactly is Excel doing behind the scenes to populate these values? So step one is about detecting and evaluating coordinates. And by coordinates I mean the row labels, the columns, or measures, and any filters that you've defined in a pivot table view. So in this case, we're interested in knowing how this number 973 was calculated. We first start by looking at the coordinates that generate it. So in this case the state is Arizona. The measure is total population. And the filter includes all ages. So those are our coordinates, and given those coordinates, Excel then jumps into the source data and it isolates only the cells that meet those exact criteria. So in this case there are five individual cells or values for the state of Arizona for all ages. Now once Excel knows which cells meet…

Contents