Basic concepts of pivot tables

Pivot tables are in contrast to popular belief not just an Excel feature but present in a lot of applications dealing with tabularly structured numerical data – pivot tables are the visual and interactive result of a general concept of data aggregation depending on categories. LibreOffice (check out the article on it), OpenOffice and R by libraries like reshape offer this technology targeting at a different audience. If you understand pivoting in one of these tools, you pretty much got it for all of them.

At my work I am offering a workshop on pivoting with Excel 2010 and so I came up with a chart boiling down the concept of using pivot tables so it fits on a sheet of PDF.

pivoting

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Pivoting over death causes in Germany using Calc from LibreOffice 3.6

This article is going to cover the usage of pivot tables and charts with Calc LibreOffice 3.6 using statistics on death causes in Germany from 1980 to 2010 – categorizing gender and 18 age groups. I am tempted to make this a data labeled article – but as the meaningfulness of absolute numbers regarding a population whose age distribution is changing over time is very restricted I won’t (did I leave out commas here?). As a matter of fact I covered fatalities caused by viral hepatitis in a previous article in more detail – I use this cause of death also in this post.

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