I am or have been attempting to extract data from a pivot table. I would
like to use a reference in "sheet 1" cell $A1 as the "item" in the
getpivotdata (the pivot table is in a separate sheet) formula below.

=GETPIVOTDATA("3Q06",$A$3,"Linking - Building code","11")

=GETPIVOTDATA(data_field,pivot_table,field1,item)

all my efforts have resulted in #ref results.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated