A Quick Guide to Copying Pivot Table Data Into Excel

Pivot tables are a powerful feature in Excel. They put flexibility and analytical power in your hands. You use pivot tables to extract information from large data tables without using formulas. 

This article includes the instructions for copying the sample data shown below into an Excel worksheet. The table here is what accompanies the step-by-step in our pivot table tutorial.

Before you begin the tutorial, follow these steps to copy the sample data into your own Excel file. Of course, these steps are relevant for any data you're needing to copy into Excel, not just the specific data shown below.

1. Highlight the data in the table below. Be sure to select from the title Cookie Sales by Region to the number $69,496 at the bottom of the table.
2. Right-click (or tap-and-hold) any part of the highlighted text and choose Copy from the browser's context menu.
   1. Tip: Another way to copy the data from the table, which is especially helpful if you're on a touch interface, is to use the Ctrl+C (Windows) or Command+C (Mac) keyboard shortcut.
3. Click or touch on cell A1 in an unpopulated Excel worksheet to make it the active cell.
4. Choose the Home tab at the top of Excel.
   1. Note: If you're using Excel 2003, you won't find the Home tab. Instead, right-click (or tap-and-hold for touch interfaces) cell A1 and go to Paste Special, and then skip down to step 7.
5. Click or tap the down arrow next to the Paste clipboard on the ribbon to open a drop-down menu.
6. Choose Paste Special from the menu to open the Paste Special dialog box.
7. From the Paste area, select Text from the options.
8. Use the OK button to paste the data into Excel.

Each piece of data is pasted into a separate cell in the worksheet. So long as you pasted the data in A1, all of it should take up the cells from the range A1–D12.

When asked in the pivot table tutorial to get information from the data sample, this is what's being discussed: