Transpose — wide to long
Cross Tab — long to wide
Cross Tab does the reverse. You set:
- Group data by — what stays as rows
- New column headers — the field whose values become columns
- Values for new columns — what fills the cells
- Method for aggregating — sum, count, first, concatenate
It aggregates by necessity, since several rows can land in one cell.
Cross Tab renames fields
Column headers are built from your data, so they inherit whatever is in it — spaces become underscores, and a value starting with a digit gets prefixed. Downstream tools referencing those names then break when the data changes.
The order problem
Cross Tab sorts new columns alphabetically. Month names come out April, August, December — not calendar order.
The usual fix is to prefix with a number (01 Jan) before the Cross Tab, then strip it afterwards if needed.
When to use which
Transpose before analysis; Cross Tab at the end for presentation. A workflow that transposes, aggregates, then cross-tabs into a report layout is a very common and very readable shape.