And each column should have a unique title. There should not be any blank columns or blank rows. Also it is advisable to have one transaction in one row. If your transactions are in columns you need to somehow transpose them to rows as shown in above data set. You can't have the transactions in columns. You need to have all the transactions in rows. So it is not compulsory to have data in the same work book where the pivot tables are. Also you can use external data to create pivot tables.

If you have created your pivot tables earlier with Excel 2007 or Excel 2010 you can use them in Excel 2013 without any problem. However newer versions of Excel pivot tables have higher level of compatibility. So it is advisable to find raw data you use to create those pivot tables in Excel 2003 and use them to create new pivot tables in Excel 2013. One important thing is if you have created pivot tables with Excel 2003, please not that they are not compatible with higher versions of Excel. You need to know few things about Excel pivot tables before proceed further. I will explain about pivot charts in another post. To do that we need pivot tables and charts. So you can see that we can analyze these data in many ways by changing the axes of charts time to time. We can compare branches each other or we can compare categories each other. So you can see that we can plot these data in various ways to suit to our requirement. Also you can plot data of each and every branch against the time to see the growth of the sales in individual branches.

Also you can use different time frames like days, weeks and months. You can plot the total sales against the time. If you have very large amount of data, it is very difficult to analyze and present them.

Excel 2013 create pivot table options