In Excel, how to group data by date, and then do operations on the data?

Question

I have Excel 2003. My data is like this:

01/10/2010 0.99
02/10/2010 1.49
02/10/2010 0.99
02/10/2010 0.99
02/10/2010 0.99
03/10/2010 1.49
03/10/2010 1.49
03/10/2010 0.99

etc. In fact it is a list of sales every day. I want to have something like this:

01/10/2010 0.99
02/10/2010 4.46
03/10/2010 3.97

I want to group by date, and sum the column B. I'd like to see the evolution of the sales over time, and display a nice graph about that.

I have managed to create pivot tables that almost do the job: they list the number of 0.99 and 1.49 each day, but I can't find a way to simply sum everything and group by date.

Thanks for reading.

Answer 1

Here's a quick step-by-step break down of what I've done, which I think achieves what you're after.

First, prepare data and select the relevant columns:

Create the Pivot Table, I've done so in a seperate sheet, it doesn't really matter where.

Drag the Date field to the "Drop Row Fields Here" box on the left.
Drag the Value field to the "Drop Data Items Here" box in the middle.
This will not quite be right, as it counts by default:

Double-click the "Count of Value" header in the top-left and set the "Summarise by" option to "Sum".