Pivot tables are an extremely important data visualization tool. While they are usually not fancy eye catching infographics or your everyday chart you are used to seeing they are immensely important when it comes to summarizing data. According to an article posted by Lorman Education (https://www.lorman.com/resources/the-6-benefits-of-using-a-pivot-table-in-excel-17423?srsltid=AfmBOorilMT3KbGTr5SUhkNiuLVKiUIeKvuuAmAej7E1n-N3S3G7kmtX) there are 6 main benefits for using pivot tables:
- Simplicity
- Data Analysis
- Data Summaries
- Pattern Recognition
- Quick Reports
- Decision Making
Pivot tables can be helpful in distilling down large raw data into a summary of thousands or more entries to create a report based on data collected. For example, our book gives us a couple thousand survey entries on student’s gender, race, whether their parent has a college education, free or reduced lunch. high school name, graduation year, and other data. It becomes a sea of data to comb through and calculate.
This is where pivot tables come into play. It takes messy raw data like this and converts it into this.
It also gives us the ability to change the parameters of the chart if we want to examine it a different way. The applications of pivot tables could be endless such as business financials evaluations, evaluating performance, and any other thing that you collect data on!