From the course: Excel: PivotTables for Beginners
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Prepare your data - Microsoft Excel Tutorial
From the course: Excel: PivotTables for Beginners
Prepare your data
- [Instructor] Okay, first things first. Before you make a pivot table, you have to be sure your data is ready. It's kind of like stretching before exercising or tuning a guitar before playing it. It's a step that really shouldn't be skipped because if you do, you might run into some problems later. The first thing we want to do is make sure the columns are named properly. This might sound really obvious, but for example, this cell here is named AMT, which is really the amount column. So we're going to go ahead and type the full word amount and press enter. The other thing we want to do is we want to get rid of any blank columns or rows. Like right here we've got column E, which is completely blank. Pivot tables are going to have a hard time with blank columns and rows. So let's go ahead and select that column E and right click and delete it. And we've got, looks like three blank rows here. So I'm going to select…
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