Any situation where you need to quickly summarize and compare large datasets across multiple variables, making it easy to identify trends and patterns, can benefit from the use of a pivot table. Examples of these scenarios include analyzing sales data by product and region, tracking website traffic by source and time of day, examining customer demographics by purchase history, evaluating employee performance metrics across departments, or summarizing project progress based on team members and deadlines.

You can use pivot tables to:

1. Run automatic calculations on summed or counted values
2. Create percentages of totals
3. Segment data by date, the user, or other variables and calculate totals

Here are some examples of how to use pivot tables in Excel:

• Summarizing Data: Pivot tables can automatically summarize data, such as combining view totals for duplicate blog posts.
• Counting Rows: Pivot tables can count rows that have something in common, such as the number of employees in each department.
• Analyzing Sales Data: Pivot tables can be used to analyze sales data, such as total revenue by month and region.
• Calculating percentages:

Here is an example from ExcelJet.

• Excel builds a two-way pivot table that breaks down sales by color and region:

• Swap Region and Color: