What is the purpose of a pivot table in excell spreadheet?

Question

What can you do with it?

Answer 1

A Pivot Table is a flexible tool for displaying data; it allows the user to re-arrange the data in a variety of different ways. Instead of trying to anticipate every possible tabulation of the data which might be useful to any reader of a report and generating it for inclusion in a paper report, you can put a flexible summary of the data in a file and let the user decide what to look at from which perspective. If you want to look at a different tabulation a month after the initial analysis, you can just re-open the Pivot Table and drag variables around to create a new view. Since Pivot Tables are data structures in files, they are convenient to send as e-mail attachments to anyone who has a copy of Excel.

hope that helps, management science :)