GS-Base Help > Using Pivot Tables

Pivot tables enable you to quickly and easily obtain and visualize various statistical information about the data stored in flat source record tables. This includes (but is not limited to) counting, summarizing, sorting, or finding partial maximum/minimum and mean values (see: Pivot Table Functions).

Tip: you can create up to 100 pivot tables for each table in the database file, with up to 256 million rows and up to 16K columns each. Once a pivot table is created, clicking the Update button always applies to the current filtered record set. If your current filtered pivot table category column has more unique values than the above ~16K limit:

  1. Use Tools > Find Unique Values and Frequencies (disregard frequencies).
  2. Select a range of records within the above limit and use Tools > Show Current Selection to "find" the selection as the record set.
  3. Update the table.

To create a new pivot table, use the View > Pivot Table View command and, in the opened pivot table pane, click Pivot Table > Add New Pivot Table, or - if this is the first pivot table - simply click the Setup button:

The pivot table Setup button

Quick Start

Open the included sample "sample.zip" database and choose the "customers" table.
The records contain (among others) the "Country" and "City" fields.

To obtain the number of customers from particular countries:

  1. Open the Pivot Table Setup dialog.
  2. Choose the "Country" database field as the only Row field.
  3. Click OK.
Pivot table of customer counts by country

To obtain the number of customers from particular countries and to find out how many of them come from given cities in that country:

  1. Open the Pivot Table Setup dialog.
  2. Choose the "Country" database field as the first Row field.
  3. Choose the "City" database field as the second Row field.
  4. Click OK.
Pivot table of customer counts by country and city

Open the included sample "sample.zip" database and choose the "orders" table.
The records contain (among others) the "ProductName" and (order) "Date" fields.

To obtain the numbers of sold products and to find out how these numbers changed over subsequent days:

  1. Open the Pivot Table Setup dialog.
  2. Choose the "ProductName" database field as the only Row field.
  3. Choose the "Date" database field as the only Column field.
  4. Click OK.
Pivot table of sold products by day

To obtain the numbers of sold products and to find out how both these numbers and the sales totals changed over subsequent days:

  1. Open the Pivot Table Setup dialog.
  2. Choose the "ProductName" database field as the only Row field.
  3. Choose the "Date" database field as the only Column field.
  4. Choose the "Total" database field as the first Data field and select the Count function for it.
  5. Choose the "Qty" database field as the second Data field and select the Sum function for it.
  6. Click OK.
Pivot table of sold products and sales totals by day