Excel Video 316 has one of the most important things to know about a Pivot Table. One of the reasons Pivot Tables can manipulate so much data so quickly is that once you set up a Pivot Table in Excel, Excel never goes back to the original data to see if the data has changed. If your data does change, you need to be sure to remember to refresh the data. We’ll go through an example today where the raw data clearly changes, but the Pivot Table doesn’t change until we refresh the data.
If you’re connecting to a data source outside of Excel, like SQL Server, you can tell Excel to check for new data every time the spreadsheet is opened. You can also tell Excel to refresh the data on a timed interval, like every 60 minutes. The last thing you want to do is to take advantage of the power of Pivot Tables but show old data. However you connect to your data, be sure that you refresh the data any time your source data changes.
