Table of data before being used in a pivot table

Google Sheets – Group Data Inside a Pivot Table

Posted on | by Prolific Oaktree

Pivot Table Groups

If you’re using a Pivot Table in Google Sheets and you want to create groups within that pivot table, you can do it with just a few clicks.

This tutorial starts with a table of sales transactions and walks you through the steps to group the transactions by region like this.

This walk-through assumes that you have completed your Pivot Table and have a basic knowledge of how to use it. See this video if you need some help on Pivot Tables.

If you need a primer on Pivot Tables, this video will walk you through them.

Pivot Table Articles

Raw Data

When you look at the table below, we can see we have different regions. We have West, East, North, and, um, just one mile left of North.

Table of data before being used in a pivot table
Table of data before being used in pivot table

Build Your Pivot Table

Let’s make the rows of our Pivot Table the value in the Region column from the table of raw data. Select any cell in the table of data and go to Data and Pivot table. This will start to fill your Pivot Table. Click ADD for the rows and select “Region.”

Use the OmniPivot add on to use more than one table as your source.

Selecting Region as the row
Selecting Region as the row

To fill in the center of the Pivot Table with data, select ADD for the Values and choose SUM, which is the default. This will show the sum of the sales by Region.

Add Amount as a value and SUM it
Add Amount as a value and SUM it

Let’s add another value here to make it look more informative. We also care about the item, right? Okay, add that as a column. This will give your Pivot Table a broader display of data.

Add Item as a Column
Add Item as a column

Video Description

Grouping the Data

Now let’s group together the compass directions and then group the One Mile Left of North in another group because he’s a little bit different so we want to analyze him differently. What you want to do is highlight the three that you want to group separately, right-click, and create a Pivot group, as shown in the image below.

Add the Pivot Table Groups
Add the Pivot Table Groups

Now, the Pivot Table has put the three compass direction territories together and then the one oddball. Now you can expand and collapse these groups in the same way that you can in a spreadsheet without a Pivot Table. That’s the way to group data in a Google Sheets pivot table. That’s all.

 Live examples in Sheets

Go to this spreadsheet for examples of pivot table groupings that you can study and use anywhere you would like.

0 thoughts on “Google Sheets – Group Data Inside a Pivot Table”

  • andrew says:

    Hello, I am trying to sift through large amounts of data where the description of the items could have one to multiples of 30 with different amounts from credit card charges for example. Is there an automated approach to group together all items with a similar name other then highlighting > rt click > create pivot group? I have thousands of items at a time and creating groups within the groups could be prone to error and take a long time. Hope this makes sense and thanks for the lessons.

  • Richard says:

    Google sheets – I have a table column A dates/ B Brand the pivot table is grouped by date (quarters ) with. Value counta brands & Value counta % of grand total
    How do I have the % of counta brands reflect off subtotal of Qtr when row is expanded for detail Qtr

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