How to easily group and total data in Excel

Let's say you have an Excel spreadsheet listing the address information of 4,000 people who attended an event. And let's say you want to know how many people came from each city grouped by state. Here's how you can quickly do this using Microsoft Excel's PivotTable.

Here's a snippet of the 4,000-row table we'll group by state and city. Be sure to include a header row. If you don't, Excel will prompt you to create one.

Now do the following:
1) Select the columns you want to group.
2) Click on the Insert tab.
3) Click on PivotTable.
4) Click OK in the Create PivotTable dialog box.

This is where you create your PivotTable by dragging the fields you want to group and total into designated areas.

After dragging the fields we want to group and total into the designated areas, we end up with the final PivotTable. The data is now grouped by state and then by city. And there are total counts for each city.