I want to use pivot table data outside the pivot table for further
calculations and this works with just the (=G4) option (not the getpivotdata
function). However, when I try to sort the data it just won't be sorted.

Example:
1. a pivot table consists of

2006 2007
country a 10 20
country b 20 40

2. I now copy all this into a new table using the (=A2, =A3 etc.) reference
function. I do not want to copy the pivot and paste values via "paste
special" as this would destroy the link to the original data and cause to
much update on my 20+ worksheets (if I had to manually copy values in all
sheets every time I updated the raw data).

3. I try to sort the new table, but it doesn't want to be sorted.

Question: why is this and can this be done at all? The overall aim is to
derive something from the values in the table and sort by that.