Here's something developer Pito Salas knows all too well: Excel's Pivot Tables and charts make analyzing data a cinch, but the former are often feared, and the latter are often poorly implemented. Still, these tools can summarize thousands of rows of detailed information almost instantly and produce a table that you can actually take in at a glance. In Excel 2007, these functions are more accessible and understandable.

PivotTables can take any list in Excel and let you pivot the view without changing the original structure of the data. A typical use for a PivotTable is to summarize business data. It might be data about customers, sales trends, inventory—any data that appears as a series of rows organized under a set of common column headings is a good candidate for a PivotTable.

Before you create a PivotTable, think about the questions you'd like to ask about your data. In the case of products you sell, it might be, "What products sell the best, and to whom?" and "What time of the year does a certain product sell best?" As you're reviewing those PivotTables, other questions may come to mind, and when they do you can rearrange the data to answer these new questions. You can also create a chart of PivotTable data that will update automatically as the summary changes. — next: Step by Step