My First Pivot Table!

I had my first stint with Pivot Table in lab. for Business Intelligence Applications and I must say, it is as Cool as it sounds.  Having missed my previous week's tutorial work, I thought it would be some really difficult task this week as it is supposed to be in continuation with last week's work, but surprisingly it was good fun. I must credit the well written specifications from the tutor as they really served as a launch pad.

Pivot tables are a smart way to display your data. It was a feature of our very own MS Excel which I had always known it exists but never ever explored before. I admit I wasn't disappointed and it is really as simple as drag and drop.  The pivot table needs data( after all you need to display some data, right?) which can be imported either from a simple source as another excel file or any database through ODBC connection. You can drag drop the fields from your data in rows and columns and pivot table will smartly create summary for you. It intelligently automates for you the summary of your data in a readable grid format.

If you are connected to a database through network, you can also save an offline copy in .cub format. Another interesting way of creating pivot table is through Panorama (some fancy name eh?) using google docs widget. 

Pivot Table using Panorama widget

You can play around with the features of pivot table but yes, every good thing has a limit. Pivot table has few limitations for example - it does not automatically refreshes itself if the underline raw data has changed (I witnessed it in lab.). However, I am sure some intelligent macros are possible which  can make pivot table refresh automatically. 

Let me know your good and bad point list about Pivot table.