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Pivot Tables are my new best friend!

by xDennis
8 replies
Okay, if you're anything like me then you have multiple e-products (amongst tangible goods) that you sell, with various marketing expenses.

If you use PayPal as your main source of paying for marketing, and your source of receiving payments then you should really look into downloading the monthly report and plugging it into an excel pivot table.

Before now, it was nearly impossible for me to know exactly which products sold, when and for how much. I sell so many thing online it's hard to keep track of it all. Not to mention the marketing expenses paid.

I found items that I have been selling for the past 8 months that I almost forgot about!!

With pivot tables, you'll be able to hone in on item specifics, it's great i've literally been messing around with 2years of paypal data for the passed 5 hours

This post is probably all over the place.. prolly cause it's 5 in the morning, i'm super sleepy ..but I just had to post out of excitement. USE PIVOT TABLES!
#friend #pivot #tables
  • Profile picture of the author infomaniacs
    LOL, I use pivots and v-lookups at work all the time, and find it very hard to get excited about them
    Seriously, they are very useful, and doing Excel training was probably the most beneficial training I have done for work.
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  • Profile picture of the author xDennis
    I think I'm so excited about them because for the past 4ever I've been using a crude way at crunching the data.. it was way to manual.. but this just made my life so much easier!

    What are vlookups? (going to google now)
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  • Profile picture of the author Shannon Herod
    So are pivot tables an actuall product or a function of excel? That might seem like a silly question but I am not a big excel user. I usually buy custom software to keep track of data.
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    • Profile picture of the author Gail_Curran
      Originally Posted by Shannon Herod View Post

      So are pivot tables an actuall product or a function of excel? That might seem like a silly question but I am not a big excel user. I usually buy custom software to keep track of data.
      Pivot tables are a part of the Excel software. The trick is to input your data in the correct way on your spreadsheet. Then you can build a pivot table and proceed to slice and dice, aggregate and drill down into your data to your heart's content.

      Pivot tables rock!
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      • Profile picture of the author Shannon Herod
        I really need to learn excel. I have never used it because I just could not be bothered to Lear it. It sounds like it has some great advantages and would probably safe me some money and time because I use about ten different softwares to manage data.
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  • Profile picture of the author 2d0k
    Originally Posted by xDennis View Post

    USE PIVOT TABLES!
    I definitely agree with you on this.. I often use loads of numerical data for analysis in my day job, the pivot table function in Excel makes the organization of info and my work as a whole a lot easier.
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    • Profile picture of the author xDennis
      Originally Posted by 2d0k View Post

      I definitely agree with you on this.. I often use loads of numerical data for analysis in my day job, the pivot table function in Excel makes the organization of info and my work as a whole a lot easier.

      Shannon, I know where you're coming from. I've had and still have a subscription to data management service, not to mention I would build my own spreadsheets. But the thing is, 1) it can get expensive and 2) you have limited control on the output AND 3) what I've found is it an actually become more of a hassle then anything else to always move data around.. it ends up and gets watered down and you don't have an exact measure of certain things.

      It's really not that difficult, you simply import the raw data, insert picot table and BAM you can start playing with the variables.. it's fun
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  • Profile picture of the author lamberw
    Excel is better than most custom programs because you can build it to your exact needs.

    It's super flexible.
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