Pivot tables are the fastest, easiest way to make sense of spreadsheets. Whether you spend 10% or 100% of your day working with data, pivot tables are a must-have spreadsheet skill.

During this 60-minute online workshop, you’ll learn how to:

• design your spreadsheet to be compatible with pivot tables (e.g., prerequisites like contiguous data);
• create pivot tables from scratch;
• navigate the field list, row headers, column headers, and filters;
• drag and drop variables to calculate averages, tallies, and sums;
• remove duplicate entries from your dataset;
• make sure your pivot table still works even after you’ve updated the raw numbers in your spreadsheet; and
• group items like names and dates together so that you can analyze them in aggregate.

Format

This workshop is heavily hands-on, so bring your energy and enthusiasm! The instructor will demonstrate a skill and then you’ll have a chance to practice using the sample datasets provided. We’ll look at several different types of datasets together, like demographic data from your organization’s member database and survey responses similar to your organization’s latest consumer satisfaction survey.

Target Audience

Anyone who uses spreadsheets. This online workshop is perfect for anyone who’s brand new to pivot tables and serves as an excellent refresher for anyone who’s used pivot tables in the past and wants to learn new shortcuts.

What People Are Saying

“The workshop was really thought provoking about how we can be more efficient in our data analysis!”

“Webinar is amazing! I’m learning so much! Thank you! This is awesome.”

“This is sooo helpful!”

“I LOVE THIS!”

@AnnKEmery is an amazing teacher! Pivot Tables are cool! @EPIPDC #data #eval #nonprofits #philanthropy #skills

— Jenny (@JennyB_DC) March 19, 2015

One thing I learned from @AnnKEmery today: you don’t have to know what you’re looking for to start looking at your data #dataanalysis — Jenny (@JennyB_DC) March 19, 2015

Learning about pivot tables for data analysis with @AnnKEmery, which will be really useful for #Philamplify — thanks @EPIPDC! #philanthropy

— Caitlin Duffy (@DuffyInDC) March 19, 2015

Pivot table webinar w @AnnKEmery is fantastic!!… — Museology Evaluation (@UWNewDirections) January 12, 2015

Outstanding webinar by @AnnKEmery on Pivot Tables! Stay tuned for highlights & notes on http://t.co/ZHHYedOcdw — Katherine Haugh (@Katherine_Haugh) January 12, 2015

Registration

This webinar is offered exclusively to EPIP members. To join EPIP, please visit http://www.epip.org/membership/.

Want to discuss a possible workshop or webinar for your team? Contact me.

• design your spreadsheet to be compatible with pivot tables (e.g., prerequisites like contiguous data);
• create pivot tables from scratch;
• navigate the field list, row headers, column headers, and filters;
• run descriptive statistics such as averages and frequencies;
• clean data by checking for duplicates;
• make sure your pivot table still works even after you’re updated the raw numbers in your spreadsheet; and
• group items like names and dates together so that you can analyze them in aggregate.

We’ll look at several different types of datasets together, like demographic data on people from your organization’s member database and survey responses similar to your organization’s latest consumer satisfaction survey.

Please bring laptops and power cords.

What People Are Saying

“The workshop was really thought provoking about how we can be more efficient in our data analysis!”

“Webinar is amazing! I’m learning so much! Thank you! This is awesome.”

“This is sooo helpful!”

“I LOVE THIS!”

@AnnKEmery is an amazing teacher! Pivot Tables are cool! @EPIPDC #data #eval #nonprofits #philanthropy #skills

— Jenny (@JennyB_DC) March 19, 2015

One thing I learned from @AnnKEmery today: you don’t have to know what you’re looking for to start looking at your data #dataanalysis — Jenny (@JennyB_DC) March 19, 2015

Learning about pivot tables for data analysis with @AnnKEmery, which will be really useful for #Philamplify — thanks @EPIPDC! #philanthropy

— Caitlin Duffy (@DuffyInDC) March 19, 2015

Pivot table webinar w @AnnKEmery is fantastic!!… — Museology Evaluation (@UWNewDirections) January 12, 2015

Outstanding webinar by @AnnKEmery on Pivot Tables! Stay tuned for highlights & notes on http://t.co/ZHHYedOcdw — Katherine Haugh (@Katherine_Haugh) January 12, 2015

Registration

This is a members-only workshop for the Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy (EPIP). Membership is $150/year for individuals ($85/year for students). Learn more at http://www.epip.org/.

• design your spreadsheet to be compatible with pivot tables (e.g., prerequisites like contiguous data);
• create pivot tables from scratch;
• navigate the field list, row headers, column headers, and filters;
• run descriptive statistics such as averages, means, counts, and frequencies;
• clean data by checking for duplicates;
• make sure your pivot table still works even after you’re updated the raw numbers in your spreadsheet; and
• group items like names and dates together so that you can analyze them in aggregate.

We’ll look at several different types of datasets together, like demographic data on people from your organization’s member database and survey responses similar to your organization’s latest consumer satisfaction survey.

You’ll get to keep the spreadsheets used during the webinar, and I’ll give you access to the webinar recording so you can watch it again while you’re practicing on your own.

What People Are Saying

“Webinar is amazing! I’m learning so much! Thank you! This is awesome.”
“This is sooo helpful!”
“I LOVE THIS!”

@AnnKEmery is an amazing teacher! Pivot Tables are cool! @EPIPDC #data #eval #nonprofits #philanthropy #skills

— Jenny (@JennyB_DC) March 19, 2015

One thing I learned from @AnnKEmery today: you don’t have to know what you’re looking for to start looking at your data #dataanalysis

— Jenny (@JennyB_DC) March 19, 2015

Learning about pivot tables for data analysis with @AnnKEmery, which will be really useful for #Philamplify — thanks @EPIPDC! #philanthropy

— Caitlin Duffy (@DuffyInDC) March 19, 2015

Pivot table webinar w @AnnKEmery is fantastic!!… — Museology Evaluation (@UWNewDirections) January 12, 2015

Outstanding webinar by @AnnKEmery on Pivot Tables! Stay tuned for highlights & notes on http://t.co/ZHHYedOcdw — Katherine Haugh (@Katherine_Haugh) January 12, 2015

Purchase the Recording and Accompanying Materials

This webinar has finished, but you can still purchase the recording and accompanying spreadsheets. Contact me.

Thank you, Ann Emery and thanks especially to the visitors of www.AnnKEmery.com. It meant a lot to be asked to do a guest blogpost because Ann’s approach is practical, focused on real-world experience, and her dedication to empowerment of others is a key theme at my own site, DataScopic.net.

I’ve been working with Excel and data for 15 years and developed a skill for scrubbing data. So, data quality is always on my mind. This year, I’m teaching more workshops so that others are empowered to manage their own data quality and develop sound spreadsheets.

Hopefully, you’ll find this blogpost useful. Please comment, ask questions and be in touch.

– Oz du Soleil

Today, we’re going to discuss data quality, messy data, or, as I’ve described in several blogposts, crap data. As a complement to this post, there is a dataset of 455 rows for us to work. Click here to download the sample dataset.

WE HAVE OUR DATA: What Do We Want To Know?

We want to dig in and find out things like:

• Of the members we had in 2009, how many are still active members?
• What were the 2010 donation amounts of the currently active vs. inactive members?
• What were the 2008-2010 donations for the states where we plan to close offices: IN, MA and SC?
• What were the 2008 donation totals of the Gold, Platinum and Lifetime members?
• Are our Lifetime members clustered in a region, in a few states or, is there no correlation between residence and Lifetime membership?

This is so easy with pivot tables. You don’t need subtotals or SUMIFS formulae. But …

1. What are we dealing with?
   • We have states in the dataset. Do we have 50 states and Washington, DC? How about Puerto Rico, Guam and US Virgin Islands?
   • For Marital Status, do we have Married, Single, Widowed, Divorced and Domestic Partnership? Or, just Married or Single?
2. Is this clean?
   • Are there empty fields? Where are they and are they critical? We can live with a missing fax number, we can’t live without a missing membership level.
   • Are there any duplicates that need to be merged into single entries?
   • Is there anything just plain bizarre? Are there complete addresses in the State field or, “NOV” in a field that should only have YES or NO?)

The old way of checking our data quality would be to scroll through, eyeballing for obvious duplicates; we would sort by the State field and eyeball through for blanks and nonsensical entries.

That is painful, tedious, and time-consuming. Eyeballing datasets is also prone to errors and must end. TODAY. Rest your eyes. A pivot table can save hours or even days, depending on the size and complexity of the dataset.

In this video, I generate a pivot table and focus only on the data quality. We see that there are duplicates and bizarre information that render the dataset untrustworthy until we get it cleaned up. As you watch the video, don’t focus too much on the results or the “how to.” Instead, listen to the thought process and questions I ask about the dataset.