Is pivot the best option here for displaying my data.

It looks like you have the right raw data and it seems to be in normalize format, so you should be able to do a lot of things with a pivot table. I'm glad to see that you have the data organized into a table, that makes life a lot easier.

Consider the attached a prototype, to give you an idea. I sliced the data two ways: Days remaining by person and days remaining by course. Let me know if this is the kind of information you want. Also let me know if you need an explanation of what I did.

I threw in a couple of Slicers - Slicers are just fancy filters. The slicers are linked to each other - so if you change one it affects both tables. Slicers are ridiculously easy to do.

It looks like this spreadsheet has a lot of potential.

One more question: Are you familiar with Jordan's American Bar - my brother & sister-in-law's place.

I'm not quite sure what you want, but with normalized data, you can do almost anything. I added a percentages sheet with two pivot tables.

The top table shows the distribution by course by status. The bottom one shows the total number of requirements by number of days due. The pivot table could show percent instead of quantity, but since the pie chart does that, I decided to leave it as quantity.

I added a helper column called Plot - it is true only if the status is not "Completed" - you may want to modify this if you also want to eliminate blank or "-" or both. It just shows one of the things you can do to make pivot tables work better. You might also want to add a helper column or filter to not show days remaining where days remaining is the null string.

It looks like the raw data could use a little cleanup to eliminate blank days, blank courses, and blank statuses.