ENH: do not sort resulting columns when sort=False

doc/source/whatsnew/v1.5.0.rst

@@ -745,6 +745,7 @@ Reshaping
 - Bug in concanenation with ``IntegerDtype``, or ``FloatingDtype`` arrays where the resulting dtype did not mirror the behavior of the non-nullable dtypes (:issue:`46379`)
 - Bug in :func:`concat` with identical key leads to error when indexing :class:`MultiIndex` (:issue:`46519`)
 - Bug in :meth:`DataFrame.join` with a list when using suffixes to join DataFrames with duplicate column names (:issue:`46396`)
+- Bug in :meth:`DataFrame.pivot_table` with ``sort=False`` results in sorted index (:issue:`17041`)
 -
 
 Sparse

pandas/core/reshape/pivot.py

@@ -216,7 +216,7 @@ def __internal_pivot_table(
             )
             table = table.reindex(m, axis=1)
 
-    if isinstance(table, ABCDataFrame):
+    if sort is True and isinstance(table, ABCDataFrame):
         table = table.sort_index(axis=1)
 
     if fill_value is not None:

pandas/tests/reshape/test_pivot.py

@@ -2167,6 +2167,28 @@ def test_pivot_table_sort_false(self):
         )
         tm.assert_frame_equal(result, expected)
 
+    def test_pivot_table_sort_false_with_multiple_values(self):
+        df = DataFrame(
+            {
+                "firstname": ["John", "Michael"],
+                "lastname": ["Foo", "Bar"],
+                "height": [173, 182],
+                "age": [47, 33],
+            }
+        )
+        result = df.pivot_table(
+            index=["lastname", "firstname"], values=["height", "age"], sort=False
+        )
+        expected = DataFrame(
+            [[173, 47], [182, 33]],
+            columns=["height", "age"],
+            index=MultiIndex.from_tuples(
+                [("Foo", "John"), ("Bar", "Michael")],
+                names=["lastname", "firstname"],
+            ),
+        )
+        tm.assert_frame_equal(result, expected)
+
     def test_pivot_table_with_margins_and_numeric_columns(self):
         # GH 26568
         df = DataFrame([["a", "x", 1], ["a", "y", 2], ["b", "y", 3], ["b", "z", 4]])