How to Sort a Pivot Table in Excel

Sort a Pivot Table in Excel

You can sort a Pivot Table in Excel horizontally or vertically. This allows you to see, at a glance, the rows or columns containing the greatest or the smallest values.

We will illustrate how to sort the values in a Pivot Table, using the example pivot table on the right, 

which shows a company's sales figures, broken down by month and sales representative.

In order to sort a column or row of the Pivot Table, we use the Excel Sort Ascending and Sort Descending commands which are represented by the following symbols in the Excel menu:

These commands are found:

In Current Versions of Excel:	Within the 'Sort & Filter' group on the 'Data' tab of the ribbon or By right-clicking on the Pivot Table and selecting the 'Sort' option
In Excel 2003:	In the 'Standard' toolbar or in the 'Data' menu, within the 'Sort...' option

Sort a Pivot Table by a Column

Imagine you want to order the months of the example pivot table, so that the month that recorded the greatest total yearly sales is listed first.

To do this:

Click on any value inside the 'Grand Total' column;

Select the 'Sort Descending' command.

The resulting sorted Pivot Table is shown on the right. This enables you to easily see that the month with the highest sales was June, followed by January.

Sort a Pivot Table by a Row

Imagine you want to order the yearly sales totals, so that the person with the greatest total yearly sales is listed first.

To do this:

Click on any value inside the 'Grand Total' row (i.e. cell B17 or C17 of the example spreadsheet);

Select the 'Sort Descending' command.

The resulting sorted Pivot Table is shown on the right. As required, the individuals have been ordered, so that the highest total sales (Smith - Total Sales: $345,908) appears first.

Note that you could also sort the table alphabetically, according to the sales peoples' names. This is done by clicking on one of the names (either cell B4 or C4) and sorting either in ascending or descending order.