Turn any query result, grid selection or table in Beekeeper Studio into a pivot table, then share it as an Excel workbook, PDF, image, Markdown, CSV, HTML or JSON.

_{Recorded in the plugin’s dev harness with 5,000 sample orders. Sped up slightly.}

Features at a glance

Drag-and-drop	Rows, Columns, Values and Filters, like a spreadsheet pivot table
11 aggregations	Count, count distinct, sum, average, min, max, median, std deviation, variance, first, last
% of total	Show any value as a share of the grand, row or column total
Date grouping	Year, quarter, month, week, day, hour, month of year, day of week
Filters and sorting	Pick values with search and counts; sort A→Z, Z→A or by value
Layout	Totals, subtotals, values in columns or rows, fixed decimals, heatmap
8 export formats	Excel, Excel + source data, PDF, PNG, Markdown, CSV, HTML, JSON
3 ways to copy	Spreadsheet cells, Markdown table, image
Any data source	Grid selections, queries, tables (with the tab’s filters), up to 100,000 rows
Fits in	Follows the light or dark theme, saves each tab’s layout, runs locally with no network calls

Building a pivot

Every column of the data appears in the Fields list. Drag a field into a zone, or click it and choose where it goes:

• Rows and Columns group the data. Stack several fields to nest groups, and drag chips to reorder them. Swap flips rows and columns.
• Values are the numbers in the cells. The same field can be added more than once, for example to show its sum and its average side by side. With no values, the pivot counts rows.
• Filters narrow the data without adding a row or column.

Drag a chip back to the field list to remove it. Click any chip for its options.

A new pivot starts from a suggested layout:

• Rows: a category-like column, such as status, plan or country.
• Columns: the main date, grouped by day, month, quarter or year to fit the range of the data. It goes in Rows instead when there’s no category column.
• Values: the sum of an amount-like column, such as total, amount or quantity, or a row count when there isn’t one.

Ids, mostly empty columns, free text and timestamps such as updated_at aren’t used. Reset layout under Options goes back to the suggestion.

Summarizing values

Click a value chip to change what it shows:

Summarize by	Works on
Count, count distinct	Any column, or rows when no field is picked
Sum, average, median, standard deviation, variance	Numbers, including numeric text
Minimum, maximum	Numbers, dates and text
First, last	Any column

Show as turns a value into a percentage of the grand total, its row total or its column total.

Grouping, filtering and sorting

Click a row, column or filter chip for:

• Group dates by year, quarter, month, ISO week, day, hour, month of year or day of week. Dates are grouped as written in the database, so time zones don’t shift them.
• Show values: a checklist of every value with its row count, a search box, All / None, and “only” to keep a single value. Filtered chips are highlighted.
• Sort labels A→Z or Z→A (numbers sort numerically, nulls go last), or by the size of the first value, largest or smallest first.

Layout options

Under Options in the sidebar:

• Totals column and totals row for grand totals, and subtotals for each group when rows or columns are nested.
• Values in columns or rows, for pivots with several values.
• Decimals: auto (whole numbers stay whole, other values use 2 places, percentages 1) or a fixed 0 to 4 places.
• Heatmap shades each value from its smallest to its largest.

The title at the top names the tab and appears on exports.

Exporting and sharing

Export saves a file. Exports always contain the whole pivot, even when the on-screen grid only shows the first rows of a very large one.

Format	What you get
Excel	Merged headers, number and percentage formats, bold totals and frozen header rows and label columns
Excel + source data	The same workbook with a second sheet of the loaded rows, ready to re-pivot in Excel
PDF	Landscape when wide. Shrinks to fit where it can and splits very wide pivots into pages that repeat the row labels
Image	A sharp PNG with the title, source and filters, ready for slides, docs or chat
Markdown	A GitHub-style table for READMEs, issues and wikis
CSV	One header row and raw numbers, with row labels repeated on every row
HTML	A standalone styled page that keeps merged headers
JSON	One object per row, keyed by column header

Copy puts the pivot on the clipboard as spreadsheet cells (pastes into Excel or Google Sheets, percentages included), as a Markdown table, or as an image.

This is the PNG the Image export produces for the pivot in the demo:

Opening a pivot table

Where	Menu item	Data used
New tab dropdown (next to +), Tools menu	Pivot Table	A query or table picked in the plugin
Query results or table data: right-click a cell or the top-left corner	Pivot Table from Selection	The selected cells
Query tab header or the query editor’s right-click menu	Pivot Query Results	The query, run again with a row limit
Table in the sidebar, or a table tab header	Open in Pivot Table	The table, with the tab’s filters as a WHERE clause

To pivot a whole result set from the grid, select every cell first (click the top-left corner of the grid or press Ctrl/Cmd+A), then right-click.

The data source can be changed at any time with the pencil button in the sidebar, which accepts a SQL query or a table with an optional WHERE clause. SQL in the status bar shows the exact query that loaded the data.

Row limits

Pivots are calculated in the plugin, so the data is loaded with a row limit: 10,000 rows by default, configurable up to 100,000 (the choice is remembered).

• Queries are wrapped as SELECT * FROM (<query>) AS pivot_source LIMIT n (TOP on SQL Server, ROWNUM on Oracle, FIRST on Firebird), so the database does the limiting.
• If the database rejects the wrapped query (for example a CTE on SQL Server), a prompt offers to run the query as written and keep the first rows. Statements that may change data are never re-run without confirmation.
• Databases without SQL subqueries (MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra and similar) run the query as written and keep the first rows.
• A banner shows when the limit was reached. Totals only cover the rows that were loaded.
• When a saved tab is reopened, query sources wait for a click on Run query instead of running automatically. Selections and tables load straight away.

Light and dark themes

The plugin uses Beekeeper Studio’s theme colors and switches along with the app.

Light	Dark

Installing

Once published, install Pivot Tables from Tools → Manage Plugins in Beekeeper Studio (5.5 or newer).

To install a build manually, download bk-plugin-pivot-tables-<version>.zip from the releases and extract it into Beekeeper Studio’s plugins directory:

• Linux: ~/.config/beekeeper-studio/plugins/bk-plugin-pivot-tables
• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/beekeeper-studio/plugins/bk-plugin-pivot-tables
• Windows: %APPDATA%\beekeeper-studio\plugins\bk-plugin-pivot-tables

Development

yarn install
yarn dev        # links the project into Beekeeper's plugins directory and serves it with hot reload
yarn harness    # runs the plugin in a browser against a fake Beekeeper Studio
yarn test:run   # unit tests (Vitest)
yarn typecheck
yarn build      # production build into dist/
yarn package    # release zip in release/ (after yarn build)

yarn dev uses @beekeeperstudio/vite-plugin, which symlinks the project into the plugins directory. Enable plugins in Beekeeper Studio, then open a pivot from any of the menus above.

yarn harness serves dev/host.html at http://localhost:5199/dev/host.html. It hosts the plugin in an iframe and answers its API requests from an in-memory SQLite database with 5,000 sample orders, so the UI and exports can be worked on without Beekeeper Studio. Query parameters:

• command=new-pivot|pivot-selection|pivot-query|pivot-table picks the menu entry to emulate.
• theme=light|dark sets the theme.
• fresh=1 clears the saved tab state.
• prod=1 loads the production build from dist/ (run yarn build first).

docs/demo.gif is recorded from the harness by scripts/record-demo.cjs, so it can be re-recorded after UI changes. With yarn harness running:

npm install -g playwright && npx playwright install chromium   # once; also needs ffmpeg
NODE_PATH="$(npm root -g)" node scripts/record-demo.cjs

Project layout

manifest.json            Plugin manifest: one view, menu entries for each way of opening it
src/App.vue              Startup, data loading, state persistence, export actions
src/components/          Field list, drop zones, menus, pivot table renderer, source editor
src/lib/pivot/           Pivot engine, aggregators, date grouping, grid layout (headers and spans)
src/lib/source/          Loading data: selections, queries and tables with dialect-aware row limits
src/lib/export/          Excel, PDF, image, Markdown, CSV, HTML and JSON exporters
tests/                   Vitest specs
dev/                     Browser harness that emulates Beekeeper Studio

The pivot engine produces a grid of cells with row and column spans (src/lib/pivot/grid.ts). The on-screen table and every exporter render from that grid, so they all show the same layout.

Releasing

1. Run bin/make-release.sh. It suggests the next version from the existing tags, sets version in manifest.json and package.json, commits, and pushes a matching tag such as v1.0.0.
2. The release workflow tests, builds and creates a draft GitHub release with manifest.json and bk-plugin-pivot-tables-<version>.zip. Review it and publish it.
3. For the Plugin Manager listing, add an entry to plugins.json in beekeeper-studio-plugins.

Limitations

• Table tab filters are passed to plugins by Beekeeper Studio builds that include the serializeTab filters change. Older versions open the whole table (with the row limit); a WHERE clause can still be typed in the source editor.
• The grid shows the first 500 rows and 300 columns of very large pivots (“Show more” loads more rows). Exports always include everything.
• Images include the first 2,000 rows.
• PDF exports can’t draw CJK characters, which the embedded DejaVu font doesn’t cover.

License

GPL-3.0. Bundles the DejaVu fonts (Bitstream Vera license) for PDF exports.