Excel pivot tables are incredibly powerful. They are simple and easy to learn, as long as you are working with clean data. Every tutorial, for understandable reasons, uses simple tables. Sometimes you have to create the table, and other times it is provided to you, but in all cases, there is nothing that you need to do to prepare (or “prep”) the data for analysis.
In the real world, how often are you able to extract data and start analyzing them immediately? Anyone who has ever worked with large data sets will tell you that you would spend the majority of your time prepping the data before you get to use pivot tables (or Minitab or any other program). Once the data are clean, then it’s a fairly straight forward process.
Large data sets often have missing or corrupt data points and will often require flagging of records based on different criteria. Before using these sets in your analysis, you need to address those issues.
For most end users, pivot tables are fine for simple counts, sums, and averages, but when it comes to mining massive data sets for improvement opportunities, you should consider working with someone with data prepping experience.