As mentioned previously, in the final stage of the PivotTable wizard you can click the Layout button to specify data for the table.

If you click the Layout button in stage three of the wizard, you will see the following dialogue box.

You can see the source data column headings at the right side of the dialogue box. You can define the initial structure for your PivotTable by dragging these headings to the various labelled white areas in the dialogue box.

To make the best use of your PivotTable, you should understand what the various areas in a PivotTable are for.

You can see from the layout dialogue box, or by examining an empty PivotTable frame, that a pivot table is broken into four main areas, namely: Page, Data, Row, and Column.

The Page area for is ideally suited to column headings (fields) that are used to identify periodic or organizational groupings of the data in your other columns. For example, you may have column headings for sales, profit, and expenses, which are grouped according to the specific month or year over which the, sales, profits, and expenses have occurred. In this case, the month or the year column heading would be placed in the page area of the PivotTable. This would allow you to populate the table with the data corresponding to whatever page field (year or month) you select. You can select a given page (year or month) and the table will display the data for that year or month.

The Data area provides the underlying context for the rest of the PivotTable. The column heading you choose for the data area of the table normally has numeric values associated with it, like units sold, profit, or expenses. This is the kind of data that can be measured and totalled to reveal trends or indicate relationships between non numeric data.

The Row and Column fields are used to categorize the data you want to examine. When you choose column headings to be placed in the row and column fields, you can see how your choices relate to each other in the context of the Data being examined. As an example, suppose you select a heading like product-type for the row area, and salesman, for the column area, and Profit for the data area. The resulting PivotTable will show the profit for different product types cross sales people.

At a glance, you can see that product Type 6, is the best selling product, and that J .Adams has generated the most sales. You can also see at a glance, the total sales for each salesman, and for each product type.

Once you have some idea of what the areas of the pivot table are for, it is easy to specify data for the table by dragging the column heading of your choice, to the appropriate table area.

In the Layout dialogue box (revealed by clicking the Layout button in the third stage of the PivotTable wizard) your column headings are available on the right side.

You can now simply use your mouse to drag and drop the column headings (field buttons) of your choice onto the appropriate PivotTable areas. When you click OK, you will be returned to the third stage of the PivotTable wizard.

Make sure that you have chosen the correct location for the PivotTable, and click finish to create it. The pivot table will contain the data that you specified.

If you create an empty PivotTable frame, like the one shown here, it is easy to specify data for it. You can use your mouse to drag and drop items from the PivotTable field list to the appropriate areas of the table.

Once again, you should specify a column heading (field) that represents numeric values for the data area. For the row and column areas of the table, choose items that you want to analyze with respect to the chosen data item.

You can place more than one column heading in a table area. This resulting table will display the combined data from both headings as shown below.

Here, both the product type heading, and the salesman heading have been dragged to the row area of the table. You can now see the combined salesman and product type data displayed across regions.