Hi,

When you draw out a pivot table, you would notice that the values in the pivot table are harcoded and not linked to the original data.  Which is why when the original data is updated, the data in the pivot table does not update automatically.  Instead the user has to right click the pivot table and click on "Refresh data" .  Now assume a situation when the figures in the original data are in absolute numbers i.e. 25,000,000 or 100,000,000.  It may so happen that the user may want to see the figures in the data table in thousands instead (25,000 or 100,000).  He can either change the original data to 1000's by dividing each number by 1000 or change the number format.  If for some reason, the original data cannot be changed i.e. divided by 1,000, the number format can be changed to #,###, (Format>Cells>Number>Custom).

Hope this tip helps.