Next, we have to decide what kind of questions we want answered. Suppose we are interested in how well unit sales of different products are doing month-by-month.

We'll want to see unit totals in the body of the PivotTable, and Date and Product name will be the categories by which these unit totals are broken down.

Another way of thinking about the PivotTable arrangement, is that numeric measures go in the body of the box, and non-numerics ("dimensions") go in the row and column headers.