Help: Creating a pivot table using search results

Pivot tables are a powerful tool for summarizing data and seeing trends. In the PitchBook Platform, you can create pivot tables for company, deal, investor, fund, collateralized loan obligations (CLO) or debt search results. This article will walk you through how to create pivot tables using your search results. It covers all the available settings and filters to help you refine your pivot table, and shows you how to save and download them.

Note that monetary units in pivot tables are displayed in millions.

After running a search, select Pivot Table from the ribbon at the top of the search results page. This will prompt a drop-down menu that lists the types of data you can pivot by.

The options in the drop-down menu are based on the results tabs available in your search results, so they will vary based on the screener you choose.

Note: If you have any filters on your search results tabs, these will be carried into your pivot table.

There are two tools available to you when editing the columns of a pivot table: the blue data columns and the grey slicer columns.

The blue data columns control the type of data displayed in the body of your table. To add a blue data column, follow these steps.

1. Click the blue + icon to the left of the blue column headers. This will open a pop-up menu featuring all the available fields.
2. Use the checkboxes to make your field selections and click outside of the pop-up menu to load your changes into the pivot table.
3. If you’d like to remove the data fields that you have added, simply deselect the checkboxes and click outside of the pop-up menu again.

Note: You can click through any cell in the pivot table to see the data that is used in calculating that cell.

The grey slicer columns allow you to group the data by category for each comparison. Adding grey slicer columns follows a similar process.

1. Click on the grey + icon to the left of the grey column headers. This will open a drop-down menu featuring all available fields.
2. Select your field(s) from the drop-down menu to automatically load your changes into the pivot table.
3. If you’d like to hide any of the fields added by the slicer, you can click the down caret next to the column header and deselect what you’d like to hide. You can also click the x icon next to the field header to remove it from your table.

Note: Adding a slicer field will filter data out of your pivot table if it does not fit into the slicer field you selected. For example, if you add a Series field but some of the deals in your search don’t have a series tagged to them, then only the portion of your deal results that have series tagging will be featured in the pivot table.

To edit the rows of your pivot table, follow these steps.

1. Click on the grey + icon above the grey row headers. This will open a drop-down menu featuring all available fields.
2. Select your field(s) from the drop-down menu to automatically load your changes into the pivot table.
3. If you’d like to hide any of the fields added by the slicer, you can click the down caret next to the row header and deselect what you’d like to hide. You can also click the x icon next to the field header to remove it from your table.

Adding filters enables you to quickly refine your pivot table results within your selected search criteria. To add filters, follow these steps.

1. Click the blue Add Filters option to the left above your table. A drop-down menu will open with the fields you can filter by.
2. After using the checkboxes to select your filters, use the down caret(s) to choose the specific details of each filter. In some fields, you can type into the box to quickly find the filter you need.
3. Click Apply filters to finalize.

By default, we hide all columns and rows with no data. To show these fields, check the box in the upper right corner labeled Show empty rows/columns.

After you’ve spent time getting the columns and rows of your pivot table just right, we recommend saving a layout. To do so, click Edit table in the upper right-hand corner. Then select Save Layout from the drop-down menu. This will prompt a pop-up menu for you to save your changes to an existing or new layout.

To download your table, click Download in the upper right-hand corner, and a copy of the pivot table will automatically begin downloading as an Excel file. Please note, this file will count as one download against your daily and monthly download limits.

To understand how this feature fits into a broader workflow, check out PitchBook Pioneer’s course – PitchBook 101.