Suppose that after looking at Figure 23-3 you decide you’d like to see the domestic and international sales figures grouped into a category called Retail. To create this group, select the Domestic and International items anywhere in the table. Then click the Options tab under PivotTable Tools, and click Group Selection in the Group group. Excel creates a new heading called Group1:

Now you can rename Group1 by typing over any instance of it.

Figure 23-24 shows a PivotTable that summarizes daily transactions by payee. As you can see, the data in this table is extremely sparse. Most intersections between a day item and a payee item are blank.

Figure 23-24. To make the data in this table more meaningful, you can group the date field.

To make this kind of table more meaningful, you can group the date field. To do this, select an item in the field. Then click the Options tab under PivotTable Tools, and click Group Field. Excel responds by displaying the Grouping dialog box, shown in Figure 23-25.

Figure 23-25. Excel gives you lots of ways to group by date.

Excel gives you a great deal of flexibility in the way your date and time fields are grouped. In the By list, you can choose any common time interval, from seconds to years, and if the standard intervals don’t meet your needs, you can select an arbitrary number of days. You can also create two or more groupings at the same time (hold down Ctrl while you select); the results of grouping by both Quarter and Month are shown in Figure 23-26.

Figure 23-26. In this table, daily data is grouped by months and then by quarters.