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101 Excel 2013 Tips, Tricks and Timesavers
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Tip 77: Identifying Data Appropriate for a Pivot Table
A pivot table requires that your data is in the form of a rectangular database table. You can store the database in either a worksheet range (which can be a table or just a normal range) or an external database file. And although Excel can generate a pivot table from any database, not all databases benefit.
Figure 77-1 shows part of a simple database table that has five columns and 3,144 rows (one row for each county). This data is appropriate for a pivot table. For example, a pivot table can instantly calculate the total population by state or by region and display the values in a nicely formatted table.

Figure 77-1: This data is appropriate for a pivot table.
Generally speaking, fields in a database table consist of two types of information:
→ Data: Contains a value or data to be summarized. For this example, the 1990 Population and the 2000 Population fields are data fields.
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