If you’re already familiar with pivot tables, you can create a pivot chart to go along with it and present your information with a lot more visual pop. Microsoft Excel can actually generate several kinds of pivot charts including bar graphs, line charts or pie charts. Let’s take a look of how this works.
First, place your cursor anywhere in your existing pivot table, then click on the insert tab in the top navigation bar, and go to the charts group. Now, select your chart type. I’m going to go with a 3D column chart. There, we have our pivot chart. All of the data in the pivot table is in the chart except for the totals. Here on the right you can also see that Microsoft Excel opened the pivot chart filter pane automatically and up above we’re in the pivot chart tool section.
Of course, any changes we make to the pivot chart in terms of how we’re formatting the data will also affect the pivot table and vice versa. You can format the pivot chart like you would with a regular chart, but you can’t move or resize the flat area and you can’t add data to the chart from outside of the pivot table.
So, let’s make a quick change. I’m going to filter the columns to only show the regions and not show the results for each city. So, I can go over here to the pivot table field less and remove the city option from my row levels just by dragging it outside of the box. There, you can see the changes also reflected in my pivot chart. If in the end you decide that you want to delete your pivot chart just select the chart boundaries and press the delete key. Our chart is gone and we’re back to just a pivot table.
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