Pivot Power

We’ve learned how to sort and filter data to quickly find what we’re looking for. But sometimes, we need more than just a filtered view; we need a summary that makes sense of thousands of rows at a glance. That’s where pivot tables come in.

Pivot tables are one of the most powerful tools in Google Sheets for summarizing and analyzing data, with no formulas required. With just a few clicks, we can transform a large, complex dataset into a clear, meaningful report.

Instead of scanning through individual sales, we can instantly view total revenue by region, average sales per product, or monthly customer counts. In this lesson, we’ll explore how pivot tables help us turn raw data into insights, fast and effectively.

Pivot table

A pivot table is a powerful tool for data analysis because it lets us pivot our data, that is, we can change the orientation and perspective of our dataset. Imagine we have a large list of sales transactions. The raw data is like a flat, long spreadsheet. By using a pivot table, we can “pivot” this flat data to create a summary. Instead of seeing every single transaction one after another, we can summarize the data by different categories, such as product, region, or date.

For example, our raw data might look like this:

This is just a small sample, but imagine this table has thousands of rows. It’s difficult to answer a question like, “What was the total revenue for each product in each region?” by looking at the raw data alone.

By using a pivot table, we can “pivot” the data to summarize it. We can make “Region” our rows and “Product” our columns, with “Revenue” as our values. This transforms the flat data into a concise, easy-to-read summary table: