Working with Pivot Tables in Virtuous BI

When working in Virtuous BI you have many similar functions to a spreadsheet. One of those functions is a Pivot table. You can use a pivot table to see a table of data organized by different ways. For example, you may want to see giving broken down by state. We can use a pivot table to organize our giving data in a way that gives us the information we need. Let's dive into it!

Getting Started

When getting started with Pivot tables, your first step is going to be getting the table of data that you need. This may be as simple as adding a table or a little more involved where you need to do a join or a union.  

Building a Pivot Table

Once you have your table, you'll select the visualization icon, then select pivot table. This will create a new, blank, visualization for you to create your pivot table.

Now you're ready to create your columns and rows. You can do this by dragging and dropping the correct column from your original table into the row or column category or by clicking the plus sign and typing in the name of the column you want to add to the pivot table.

Now that you have your rows or columns you will want to determine what values you're summarizing on. Just like when you added the row/column, you can either drag and drop or select the plus sign.

Once you have added your row/column and values, this is going to take our original table and summarize the content. The column that is create when you add the value automatically assumes an aggregate function. If you want to change the aggregate function, choose the arrow button beside the value column to change to another function.

Advanced Features

Once you've created your basic pivot table there are a few things we can do to make it more useful. You can:

• Drill Down or Up - on a visualization, you can choose to dig a little deeper into the information presented, kind of like a filter. 
• Just like other visualizations you have filter options available as well. 
• Add additional tables, columns, or values. In the example explored in this article this may mean:
  • Adding City to the rows section so I can see giving broken down by city as well as by state
  • Adding a values column to see the number of contacts in each state or to see the average of the first gift by state.
  • Adding a column to show the above giving information also broken down by zip code.
• Changing names of columns and the table - this can be done by simply clicking on the Report name or the aggregate column to change the name. You will not be able to change the column or row names of the fields that you're pulling from your Virtuous data.

Now that you know how to create pivot tables, you can check out these other Virtuous BI articles to get you using it like a pro!

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