Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, and 2013. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: Counting with PivotTables.

Counting with PivotTables

by Allen Wyatt
(last updated November 20, 2018)

1

Suppose you have a data table set up in Excel that represents your club membership. In the first column are the names of club members. In the second column are the cities in which the members live. If you want to find out how many people live in each city, there are several methods you can choose. One method is to create a PivotTable.

To create a PivotTable on your data, follow these steps:

  1. Select a cell within your data table.
  2. Make sure the Insert tab of the ribbon is displayed.
  3. In the Tables group, click the PivotTable tool.
  4. Excel displays the Create PivotTable dialog box. (See Figure 1.)

    5. Figure 1. The Create PivotTable dialog box.

  5. In the Range box, make sure your entire data table is selected, then click on OK. Excel creates an empty PivotTable worksheet.
  6. Drag the City field from the field list to the Row Labels area.
  7. Drag the Name field from the field list to the Values area. Your PivotTable is complete.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (6160) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, and 2013. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Counting with PivotTables.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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What is one more than 6?

2016-07-16 05:53:21

Eldad

I have a list of 468 zip codes from a mailing list. I want to count the number of listings for each zip code listed: in other words, about half of the list is in 01257, but there are high concentrations in adjacent zip codes, and then two or three in each of about a dozen. How do I get Excel to (a) identify the individual codes without me listing them by number and COUNTing them, and (b) how do I get Excel to count the frequencies of each zip code?

I want Excel to build me a chart of frequency statistics without me lifting more than an index finger.

Thanks.

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