How To Create Pivot Tables in Google Docs

Google has rolled out a new feature of creating pivot tables in Docs starting from 17th of this month to all its users. Pivot tables make it easy to process and summarize large data sets in seconds. It allows you to “pivot” or rotate data, thus looking at it from different angles and seeing a variety of patterns which may not be immediately obvious.

Read more about Pivot Table from Wikipedia here.

Official Google blogger team created a small ‘How To’ using a simple example of a list of students.

This list includes a number of students and some information about them, including gender, class level, and major.

Now, to create a pivot table, select your data and go to Data > Pivot Table Report. In the pivot table report editor, you can add fields to set your rows, columns, and values and can drag and drop the fields around within the editor. Here, they’ve used pivot tables to display the number of students in each class level by gender.

Fields in the Values section can be summarized using built-in formulas to sum, count, or otherwise calculate your data. In the example above the number of students in each class level was summarized via a simple count.

The filter section lets you specify exactly what data you want to be included in the pivot table. For example, we can choose to only count the students in certain extracurricular activities.

With each change, the pivot table is updated in real-time for both you and any collaborators. If you prefer to make changes in batches, you can switch to manual mode. In this mode, your changes won’t be saved until you select Update table.

If you want to try out this new feature, try this preconfigured template or by using your own data set. Currently, Pivot tables from Microsoft cannot be uploaded to Google docs. Google may add this feature in near future.