The real benefit of the Alternative & Pivot table is that if anything goes wrong on the pivot table you can delete and start again as the data is on the alternative sheet and in a decent format.

It would be a bit of a chore to change from the across view you start with to the alternative view. Not impossible but manual work.

The outline is easy to add, just select the column you want to be able to hide then click on Data > Group (on the right under Outline)