I can create a nice metabase card that does my crosstab, but when I download the results, the data is no longer pivoted. Is there something I’m missing?
1 Like
Hi @ccurvey
Currently formatting is not exported - including Pivot - upvote by clicking 
on the first post of these issues:
https://github.com/metabase/metabase/issues/2473
https://github.com/metabase/metabase/issues/10879
@flamber was just wondering. If we set up an email alert in Metabase to send Pivot output to end user - when user downloads, this would be in pivot form and not unformatted ? Could this be a workaround ?
@Krishna No, any download will not be Pivot. If you need to download pivoted format, then you will need to transpose your results in SQL.
hmm ok @flamber. i thought about SQL option. just that in the expected Pivot output user needs nested (two) headers. I guess this is not possible via SQL.
@Krishna You'll have to create two visualizations - one Pivot and one SQL transposed. It's a workaround. Again, this is not supported in Metabase, so you'll have to find a workaround that works for you.
Thanks @flamber yes will try to think of some workaround 
The pivot table in Metabase is so intuitive, also easily able to drill down, see xrays etc. just due to the download part, hate to move to some non elegant alternative!
Cant the pivot download be addressed like a bug fix, is it a major change ? Since i saw that in 0.41, u have already taken care of lot of formatting issues around xlsx download.
@Krishna It is not a bug, it's a feature request. Metabase only visually creates Pivot (with help from a lot of extra queries), so it's not a one-line "fix" to make it download in the same format.
Generally Metabase has not prioritized export of data, since we want people to stay in Metabase, so they can take advantage of all the functionality you mention.
There are other tools out there if you just want to export data from your databases.
yes what ur saying is fair @flamber
i work with financial services users. they usually have a lot of summarised data already in excel.
so the use case is - new visualisations e.g., this Pivot, we are trying to deliver via Metabase, but user wants to download and put this against the existing summary in excel to get holistic view.
guess we need to encourage them to move more and more of their existing excel stuff into Metabase
Pivot Table is a Visualization part of query. What I did and you can follow is change the visualization into table and then export the data and open in Excel and you can make a pivot table there. No need for SQL queries