Using a PivotTable to Count Items

Summary: One of the ways you can use PivotTables is to generate counts of various items in a data table. This is a great technique if your data table has quite a few items in it.

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:

Select a cell within your data table.
Make sure the Insert tab of the Ribbon is displayed.
In the Tables group, click the PivotTable tool. Excel displays the Create PivotTable dialog box. (Click here to see a related figure.)
In the Range box, make sure your entire data table is selected, then click on OK. Excel creates an empty PivotTable worksheet.
Drag the City field from the field list to the Row Labels area.
Drag the Name field from the field list to the Values area. Your PivotTable is complete.

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Using a PivotTable to Count Items