Occasionally you may want to filter a pivot table based on values in other cells. This is to avoid having to check so many items. You can use VBA but an alternate is to create a helper column in the underlying data. Using VLOOKUP, check if the data matches one of the filter values.
Now when you refresh the pivot table, the new helper column will be available and you check one item instead of many.
Alternatively, perhaps you want to set up a cell so that when you choose a filter, ALL the pivot tables in the workbook use that filter (without building complex VBA). You can do this with a slicer.