One of the best ways to master Google Sheets — the powerful spreadsheet app that you use in a web browser — is to learn how to build and use pivot tables.
To describe it very generally, a pivot table takes data from a group of cells in your spreadsheet and presents it in more comprehensible and interesting ways.
Pivot tables are mainly used to compile number data in cells, but they can also manipulate text data. And they’re most helpful when they’re used to extract cell data from a spreadsheet that has lots of columns or rows.
Why use pivot tables?
The best way to explain what a pivot table does, and why you would want to create one, is to show examples. Below is a spreadsheet of “raw” cell data that hasn’t been organized. Note the two columns that list the product names and the amounts of each product that were sold. Sales for the same product names were entered multiple times, so it’s impossible to tell at a glance the total sales for each product type.
