Analysing Tabular Data using a Pivot Table

Sometimes our source data isn’t in a format that can be readily analysed by a “normal” pivot table However, there is a trick you can try that may well save a lot of time and effort.

By Wyn Hopkins

For, example, the data set below gives the brand name of each purchase made by our customers.
But how do we find out the total number of purchases of Brand B?  This is a tricky issue,  maybe a new column could be added to do a countif?

A “normal” pivot table cannot do this, however a solution does exist.