Pivot Tables Without the Drag-and-Drop: One Row, One Column, One Number
Piskes Sheets' pivot tables are deliberately narrower than Excel's — one row field, one column field, one value — and that's the point, not a gap.
Pivot tables have a reputation problem. They're one of the most powerful features in any spreadsheet, and also one of the most intimidating — field wells, drag-and-drop zones, a half-dozen settings before you see a single number. Most explainers spend as much time describing the interface as the concept. Piskes Sheets took a different approach: instead of a smaller version of Excel's pivot UI, it built a pivot table around one row field, one optional column field, one value field, and one aggregation. That's it.
What you actually get
Pick a field to group your rows by. Optionally, pick a second field to break those rows into columns. Pick a value field and an aggregation — sum, count, average — and Piskes computes a live pivot over the range. "Live" is the operative word: the pivot isn't a static copy of your data taken at the moment you built it. It's a spec — the field choices and aggregation — evaluated against the actual, current workbook every time. Change the underlying data, and the pivot reflects it, not because it re-ran when you clicked something, but because it was never storing a copy of the numbers in the first place.
What it doesn't do, on purpose
Excel's pivot tables support multiple row fields nested inside each other, calculated fields that derive new values from existing ones, and "% of total" style summary calculations layered on top of a base aggregation. Piskes Sheets' implementation supports none of that, and the code that implements it says so directly in its own comments — this isn't an oversight discovered in testing, it's a documented boundary.
That's worth sitting with rather than apologizing for. The complexity Excel's pivot tables carry exists to serve genuinely complex analysis needs, and if you have those needs, you likely already know it. But most people building a pivot table are asking a much simpler question than Excel's interface assumes: "how much did each region sell, broken down by product line" is one row field, one column field, one value, one aggregation — exactly the shape Piskes Sheets was built to answer directly, without making you learn a field-well interface to get there.
The honest tradeoff
If your analysis genuinely needs nested row groupings or calculated fields, Piskes Sheets' pivot table isn't going to get you there today, and it's worth knowing that going in rather than discovering it mid-build. But for the much larger set of pivot tables that are really just "group by this, break out by that, show me the total" — which is most of them — skipping the drag-and-drop interface entirely and just picking four things directly is less friction, not less capability where it counts.