Creating a basic pivot table
- By Bill Jelen
- 2/17/2025
- Format your source data before creating a pivot table
- How to create a basic pivot table
- Understanding the Analyze Data, Copilot, and Recommended PivotTable features
- Using slicers to filter your report
- Keeping up with changes in the data source
- Sharing the pivot cache or creating a new cache
- Saving time with PivotTable tools
- Next steps
Understanding the Analyze Data, Copilot, and Recommended PivotTable features
As this book is being written in the summer of 2024, the Artificial Intelligence industry is moving at the speed of sound. At this point, Copilot is still in preview and will be coming out to General Availability later in 2024.
At this moment, the Analyze Data feature is the mature option for creating pivot tables and pivot charts using Artificial Intelligence. In 2024, Microsoft changed the legacy Recommended PivotTable functionality to use the same algorithm as the Analyze Data. Looking forward, the ability for Copilot to create a pivot table has been trained using the existing Analyze Data feature.
TIP
Analyze Data feature uses artificial intelligence
The Analyze Data feature uses artificial intelligence to analyze up to 250,000 cells of your data. It offers descriptive pivot tables and then offers far more advanced analyses. The Analyze Data feature often produces over 30 choices. Figures 2-22 and 2-23 show some results available from it.
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FIGURE 2.22 Artificial Intelligence detected a pair of outliers in this segment of the data.
FIGURE 2.23 Ideas detected a repeating pattern. This might indicate some weekly or monthly seasonality.
Unfortunately, customers who purchased a perpetual license to Excel 2021 or Excel 2024 will not have the feature in either location. Microsoft’s stance is that if you are not continuing to pay a monthly subscription fee, you cannot make use of the Office intelligent services.
In late 2019, a second iteration of artificial intelligence was added that allows you to ask a natural-language question about your data. See Figure 7 in the Introduction for an example.