We started with a simple Excel PivotTable, now let’s move on to a multi-column or two dimensional PivotTables. They aren’t a lot more complicated than a basic PivotTable, just add a few more fields.
We’ll start with the same sales list that we used for our PivotTables 101 article. This time we’ll make a more useful PivotTable that shows more detail than a simple column.
Let’s start dragging the following fields to the different areas as shown in the figure below.
- Sales into the Values area.
- Country into the Rows area
- Product fields into Columns area
The first three (Rows, Filters and Values) are the same as the ‘one-dimensional’ example.
What makes this a better ‘two-dimensional’ PivotTable is the addition of the ‘Columns’ .
Making a ‘2D’ Excel PivotTable just means there’s data fields in both the Rows and Columns elements.
That’s all you got to do. The difference is adding a field to the ‘Columns’ area in addition to Rows and Values.
Check out the following figure of the two-dimensional Pivot table:
The two-dimension version breaks up the sales by country and product.
