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It seems no one mentioned this. Joel Spolsky had this famous "lecture": You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky [1], where the talk about pivot table starts at 50:4

• chrisfinazzo 3y ago
  If you've never really grokked spreadsheets like Excel, this is a great place to start. Although I don't have Office installed, most of what Joel demos can be done in Numbers if you are so inclined. It's not nearly as powerful as Excel, but for my needs it's capable enough. As regards Pivot Tables, I think Numbers had them at some point early in its history, but it wasn't 1.0 - Notably, Apple's implementation was significantly different than Excel and people complained, loudly enough that it was rewritten to be more compatible with MS in a later version. The elephant in the room is (unsurprisingly) SPSS, which I had the unfortunate luck to encounter in my Research Methods class during grad school. Since that time (2010-2012), many of the other frameworks and tools have emerged to either fill in gaps or do the kinds of analysis that even Excel isn't well suited for.