Using Pivot Tables in Excel to Rearrange and Manage Complex Datasets

In this session, we will look at Pivot Tables in Excel. This is a highly valuable tool when working with complex datasets, as it allows you to rapidly reorganise and summarise entire datasets. Whilst initially, Pivot Tables might be confusing, they will quickly become a vital tool for those of you who like to work in Excel over other software. In this particular tutorial, we will work with an Open Access dataset from the site Data Dryad, that was deposited as part of a Ecological Monographs paper authored by Bryson in 2014. Whilst the dataset we use is predominantly biological in nature, all marine scientists (and indeed those in other scientific disciplines) will require some level of data management, and Pivot Tables can be very useful.

In this particular, example, I show you how to extract data quickly for a single species of seaweed, Ascophyllum nodosum, and also to extract data from multiple sites (again for A. nodosum), and produce a simple bar chart that replicates Figure 3 B in Bryson et al. (2014). See below for examples of the two tasks that I undertake in the video:

Task 1, extract the High Exposure/Low Exposure means for Ascophyllum nodosum coverage, calculate Standard Error and plot a simple graph.

Task 2, replicate Figure 3B from Bryson et al. (2014) using Pivot Table to manage data.