Excel: PivotTables for Beginners

Course details

PivotTables don't have to be intimidating! This powerful Excel feature can transform hours of manual work into a clean, interactive summary in minutes. In this beginner-friendly course, Excel expert Deb Ashby demystifies PivotTables and walks you through everything you need to start analyzing data with confidence. Deb covers foundational concepts, how to prep your data, and how to build a PivotTable from scratch—including value fields, row fields, filters, slicers, and date grouping. She also shows how to refresh your PivotTable as data changes. Finally, she introduces Microsoft 365 Copilot in Excel, showing you how to generate PivotTables using AI—and how to verify the output.

Learning objectives
Build a PivotTable from raw data using value fields, row fields, and filters.
Apply formatting, slicers, and date grouping to customize PivotTable analysis.
Refresh a PivotTable to reflect updated source data.
Generate and verify AI-created PivotTables using Copilot in Excel.

Concepts

Introduction

Getting started with Excel PivotTables

Basic PivotTable Concepts

PivotTables - Key concepts and benefits
Prepare your data for analysis using Power Query
Prepare your data for analysis using Copilot
Challenge - Clean and structure a raw dataset
Solution - Clean and structure a raw dataset

Building a Basic PivotTable

Create a PivotTable and pivot the fields
PivotTable aggregation - Sum, Count, Average, and more
Format PivotTable values - Currency, percentage, and more
Customize the PivotTable report layout
Add slicers to filter PivotTable data
Group dates in a PivotTable (days, months, quarters, years)
Refresh a PivotTable after data changes
Use Copilot to generate and analyze PivotTables
Challenge - Build a sales summary PivotTable
Solution - Build a sales summary PivotTable

Conclusion

PivotTables - Next steps and further learning

Excel: PivotTables for Beginners

Authors

Deb Ashby