Assuming we have two separate tables: one contains sales records, and the other contains details on the cost of the products sold. We want to use them in a standard Excel PivotTable… what do we need to do?

Answer 1

Export our data and use a program other than Excel

Answer 2

Use VLOOKUP (or some other function) to create one master table in order to act as a source for our PivotTable

Answer 3

Create a relationship between the two tables so that we can use them in a single PivotTable

Answer 4

Don’t know

Answer 5

Create a calculated field on the PivotTable that multiplies Quantity by Price

Answer 6

Add a column to the source table that multiplies the Sales Quantity by the Sales Price, then drop that field in the values area of the Pivot

Answer 7

Drop Sales Quantity and Sales Price into the values area of the PivotTable, then run a formula down the side of the PivotTable to multiply the two against each other

Answer 8

Don’t know

Answer 9

Setting up the extra columns adds extra data which uses more memory and can slow down your Excel file

Answer 10

VLOOKUP formulas are difficult to write

Answer 11

Setting up the extra columns is tedious work and leads to the potential of creating erroneous data or formulas that don’t update properly when the data source is updated

Answer 12

Don’t know

Assuming we have two separate tables: one contains sales records, and the other contains details on the cost of the products sold. We want to use them in a standard Excel PivotTable… what do we need to do?

Assume we have the table of data shown below serving our PivotTable. We’d like to report the Total Sales $ for all products sold. Which is the easiest way to make this happen?

Assume you have a data set that is 4,000 rows long, and you need to add 16 columns of variations to display the data correctly in your PivotTable. What is the biggest drawback to this approach?