Book excerpt: Pivot tables are the most powerful feature in Excel. A basic pivot table will allow you to summarize 500,000 rows of transactional data in 30 seconds with just a few mouse clicks. Business productivity would skyrocket if everyone knew how to use pivot tables. However, only 12% of people using Excel can create a basic pivot table. Of this group only a small percentage actually harness all the power that pivot tables afford them. By the end of the book, users will be pivot table gurus automating pivot tables using VBA, creating pivot tables with external data in OLAP cubes, and even creating dynamic reporting systems so that managers can answer their own queries with a few mouse clicks. Throughout the book there are no-nonsense, step-by-step tutorials and lots of practical examples aimed directly at business users.