Build your first Pivot View in Gridfox (in under 2 minutes)

If you’ve never built a pivot before, this is the easiest way to get your first “aha” moment:

You’ll start with a list of records… and end with a clean summary that answers a real question.

In this post, we’ll build a Pivot View in Gridfox and then quickly upgrade it with totals, charts, and drilldowns.

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What we’re building (the beginner-friendly pivot)

We’ll answer a classic project question:

“How many items are in each Status, for each Team?”

That means:

• Rows: Team
• Columns: Status
• Values: Count of items (we’ll use an ID/counter field)

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Step 1: Open your project

1. In Gridfox, navigate to the project you want to analyse.
2. Go to the Grid/Table view where your records live (Tasks, Tickets, etc.).

Tip: Pivots work best when your data has repeated categories like Status, Assignee, Client, Team, Priority.

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Step 2: Add a Pivot View

1. In the sidebar, click Add View
2. Click Pivot
3. Click Next

You’ll land on Pivot View Setup.

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Step 3: Choose your required fields (Rows, Columns, Values)

This screen is the pivot “builder”. You can set:

• Multiple row fields
• Multiple column fields
• Multiple value fields

For our first pivot, you’re fields may differ but we’ll use the following for this demo:

1. Row Fields: Team (List field)
2. Column Fields: Status (List field)
3. Value Fields: Task ID (Auto Counter) → aggregated as Count

View name is optional, click Next.

If you don’t have a “Team” field, swap it for Assigned To (it works just as well).

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Step 4: Meet your Pivot View

After clicking Next, you’ll see your initial pivot view.

At the top of the view (in the navbar), you’ll see Pivot Settings.

Click it.

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Step 5: Use Pivot Settings to make it immediately more useful

Pivot Settings opens on the right-hand side. Here are the quick upgrades that matter most.

Totals (high signal, low effort)

• Show column totals → adds totals for each column
• Show row totals → adds totals for each row

These two toggles alone often turn a “nice table” into a decision-making tool.

Compact mode (for heavy pivots)

• Show compact pivot reduces padding so large pivots are easier to scan (and easier to fit on screen).

Heatmaps (spot patterns fast)

• Enable heatmaps helps you instantly see “hot spots” (big numbers) and “cold spots” (small numbers).

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Step 6: (Optional) Turn the pivot into a chart

In Pivot Settings, toggle:

• Show chart

Now you’ll see chart controls:

• Chart type: Column / Bar / Line / Stacked bar
• Axis dimension: Rows or Columns
• Series mode: Dimension or Value field

A simple starting combo that works for most teams:

• Chart type: Column
• Axis dimension: Rows
• Series mode: Dimension

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Step 7: Edit fields (and add more power without rebuilding)

In Pivot Settings you can edit:

• Row fields
• Column fields
• Value fields

This is where pivots become addictive: you can “pivot the pivot” without starting over.

Try these upgrades:

• Add a second row field: Team → Assignee
• Add a second value field: Estimate (hrs) as Sum
• Swap columns: Priority instead of Status

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Step 8: Bucketization (when you choose a date or number)

When you select a numeric or date field, Bucketization appears.

• Gridfox will automatically set buckets based on your data
• You can customise buckets to match how your team thinks (weeks, months, ranges, etc.)

Examples:

• Dates → by week or month
• Cycle time → 0–2 days, 3–7 days, 8–14 days, 15+ days
• Cost → £0–£500, £500–£2k, £2k+

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Step 9: Aggregations (what your value fields actually mean)

Each value field has aggregation settings (e.g. Count, Sum, Average).

Common choices:

• Count of items (best for volume/workload)
• Sum of hours/cost (best for effort/spend)
• Average cycle time (best for performance)

If your pivot “looks wrong”, it’s usually because the aggregation isn’t what you expected.

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Step 10: Drill down (the best part)

A summary is useful — but being able to click into the exact records is what makes pivots actionable.

From the chart

• Hover over a chart element → the relevant row/column is highlighted in the pivot table
• Click the element → a drilldown appears

From the table

• Right-click a pivot cell → Drill down

• You can also:

  • Copy cell value
  • Export pivot

This turns “we have 14 stuck items” into “here are the 14 items — let’s fix them.”

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Filtering: keep the pivot focused

Pivot View supports the same filtering you can use across other view types.

That means you can:

• filter out noise (archived, cancelled, irrelevant teams)
• focus on one client/team/status
• analyse “just last month” or “just this quarter”

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3 ready-to-copy pivot setups (for your first week)

If you want instant wins, try one of these:

Workload

• Rows: Assignee
• Columns: Status
• Values: Count of items

Priority pressure

• Rows: Team
• Columns: Priority
• Values: Count of items

Trend

• Rows: Month (bucketized date)
• Columns: Status (optional)
• Values: Count of items or Sum of hours

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What’s next

You’ve built a Pivot View, upgraded it with totals + charts, and learned how to drill down to the underlying records.

Next up: we’ll share a handful of “pivot questions” you can copy (and the exact setups that answer them), so you can get value even if you’ve never done analysis before.