Use Excel’s pivot table and charts to determine the monthly cost of postage

A few days ago I was asked to calculate the monthly cost of postage. I decided to create a blog post because the person who I carried this task out for does not know how to use Excel and I suspect a lot of people may be in the same predicament.

The easiest way for me to calculate the monthly costs was to enter the invoice data into an Excel spreadsheet and then manipulate the data that way. I have anonymised the data that is entered in this spreadsheet, rounding all of the values up, to ensure client confidentiality. I then created two pivot tables and charts to go along with those pivot tables.

I created two separate pivot tables by going to the Insert tab in the ribbon and clicking onto the PivotTable icon:-

For the first pivot table, I chose to have it appear on the same page as the data, starting at cell E1:-