Using a pivot table on your member roster

Owned by Brian McLaren (Deactivated)
Last updated: Sept 05, 2023 by Dawn Terminella
2 min read

You can slice and dice your Member roster using Pivot Tables so you can learn interesting things about your membership.  This is a basic skills level tutorial for how Pivot tables work and how you can use them with your membership roster data.

In Netforum, we had over 3000 different reports because we had customized a basic reports in countless variations.  This often made it hard to find the report you needed.  In Fonteva, we've intentionally limited the reports to several basic reports that can serve a variety of business needs, but we've made them flexible so you can easily look at the data using tools like excel.  This gives you more control over what you're doing with your data. Remember: 

  • Everyone has different things they need to do.
  • Everyone has a unique way they do those things.
  • There is no right or wrong way to do any of it
  • We built Fonteva's reports to be flexible so that everyone can do the things they need to their data and get the result that is right for how they do their work.
  • Excel (and YouTube) is your friend!


Step-by-step guide

  1. Download your full membership roster
  2. Select INSERT and PIVOT TABLE, then accept the recommended table size
  3. Drag FULL NAME down to the VALUES area in the lower right of the screen - this will show you your member count for your whole chapter
  4. Drag MEMBER TYPE down to the ROWS area in the lower right of the screen - this will break down your member count by member type
  5. Drage SECTION ASSIGNMENT, LOCAL ASSIGNMENT, and STATE ASSIGNMENT down to the ROWS area - this will further break down your member counts by state, local, and sections (if you have any).
    TIP: remember that the order of the fields you have in the ROWS area will be the heirarchy for how the data is segmented in the pivot table.
  6. Drag EMERITUS to the COLUMNS area in the lower right of the screen - this will give you the counts for how many people have the emeritus checkbox as TRUE or FALSE.
  7. Double-click on one of the member types in the table (Ex: double click on Architect) and the system will as you how you want to further break down the data into more detail. Select FULL NAME and click OK. - this will let you drill down and see which specific members are the data points for your pivot table.

Google sheets

If you don't have MS Excel, you can do exactly the same thing in Google Sheets using almost these same steps. There will be some differences in where the areas are you drag and drop to/from, but the concepts are very similar.

In google sheets, pivot tables are found under DATA>PIVOT TABLE