Simple Explanation Tutorial of Pivot in Tableau

For a while I had problems envisioning why you should use the pivot in Tableau. I gradually came to understand it can be helpful when you want to aggregate data in a different way than it is set up in your original Excel table.

Here is a simple example to help you understand why Microsoft Excel data may not work well in tableau until you transform it using the pivot option.

Here’s some simple data from the mythical Maryland seafood company. They have organized their data in Microsoft Excel to represent their sales for each quarter of 2020 and to divide those cells between product A and product B and between online and in store. Unfortunately when Tableau tries to aggregate this data it will be difficult to aggregate on the basis of sales by quarter and to compare quarter 1 sales to quarter 3 sales.

Sales for fictional company in columns under each quarter in heading.

When we import this data into Tableau, this is what we see in the data source pane:

Tableau imported the data as represented in Excel

If we wanted to make a comprehensive report to the boss on this data, we could create a bar chart that shows the sales for each product and sales channel combination across all four quarters. However, to do this we would need to pivot the data…