Why use a pivot table when you can just copy and paste?

Answer 1

A pivot table is a quick way to easily tabulate data, with customised summaries and breakdowns. It's many, many times faster than creating the table manually by copying and pasting.

The reason why you would use a pivot table is because they are powerful tools for representing large data sets. If you have a data set that contains hundreds of columns and thousands of rows you cannot represent this data in a meaningful way through copy and pasting. Well I guess you could but it would take hours and hours of collecting and formatting the data whereas with a pivot table it would take a matter of minutes.

Take the following example to illustrate this point. Say you have the economic data of all the countries in the world in no particular order in a spreadsheet. The only identifiers in the data are found in the columns where the headings might read: Country, Region, GDP and so on. The rows contain all the data headed in the columns so a row with the column headed country would contain, Zimbabwe, USA etc. Say you are asked to find the GDP for all sub-Saharan countries in Africa. Trying to get this data through copying and pasting would take far too long and this is where a pivot table comes in handy as you can manipulate this large data set to present the data as you wish without actually affecting the data set itself. It is also a lot less error prone than copy and pasting.