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PivotTable Styles

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  • Lesson resourcesResources
  • Quick referenceReference
  • Transcript
  • Notes

About this lesson

Using pre-defined styles with a PivotTable.

Lesson versions

Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:

2016, 2019/365.

Exercise files

Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ Excel workbooks from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.

PivotTable Styles
199.6 KB
PivotTable Styles - Completed
199.3 KB

Quick reference

PivotTable Styles

Using pre-defined styles with a PivotTable.

Where/when to use the technique

Dressing your PivotTables up with a bit more color and style to make them show off nicely.

Instructions

Choosing a style

  • Select a cell in the PivotTable
  • Go to the PivotTable Tools > Design tab
  • Mouse over the various PivotTable styles until you find one you like

Style options

  • Under the PivotTable Tools > Design tab, there is a PivotTable Style options group
  • Check/uncheck the items to customize your style
  • Options include highlighting
    • Row headers
    • Column headers
    • Banded rows
    • Banded columns
  • HINT:  Selecting these items in advance, changes the style appearance in the Styles gallery!
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  • 00:04 What we'll look at now is how to give our pivot tables a little bit different style
  • 00:08 to what they have right now.
  • 00:10 Every pivot table comes with a built-in default style.
  • 00:13 What's a style?
  • 00:14 It's essentially just a pre-packaged set of formatting that's applied to the actual
  • 00:18 pivot table itself.
  • 00:19 Now, the cool thing is that we're not stuck with this light blue, not a chance.
  • 00:24 If we actually go up to the pivot tools Design tab,
  • 00:26 you'll notice that there's actually a styles gallery here.
  • 00:29 And if we click the little drop down arrow near the bottom, you can see there's
  • 00:32 a whole bunch of different styles that you can actually play with for
  • 00:35 your pivot tables.
  • 00:36 There's light ones, there's dark ones, there's medium ones.
  • 00:38 And the cool thing here is if we decide that there's one that we like to look at,
  • 00:41 we can just go and say, hey, let's click on it and
  • 00:43 see how it looks on our pivot table.
  • 00:45 Now, the other thing though, that's interesting about the way this works is
  • 00:49 that you have some pivot table style options over in the corner here.
  • 00:52 So I could say uncheck Row Headers.
  • 00:55 You'll notice that at this point,
  • 00:57 it's actually stopped the shading on the alcohol and food here.
  • 01:00 I could say uncheck the Column Headers, and
  • 01:03 at that point my pivot table header goes back to this light blue.
  • 01:06 You'll also notice the style gallery is actually showing the changes
  • 01:10 live inside there.
  • 01:11 So we can actually play around with these and say, okay, well after we start making
  • 01:15 changes to the options, what does it actually do to the actual gallery?
  • 01:19 What if we wanted Banded Rows?
  • 01:21 We could click on that.
  • 01:22 Now, in this style, it shows some kind of strange pieces here.
  • 01:26 But what would happen if we chose a different style?
  • 01:28 Could we see something slightly different?
  • 01:30 Like maybe how about this one here?
  • 01:33 And now you'll notice that we actually have banded rows showing up.
  • 01:36 Let me turn the Row Headers back on.
  • 01:38 It goes into bold in the style, and
  • 01:40 the Column Headers will bring the header back on the pivot table.
  • 01:43 What about Banded Columns?
  • 01:47 There we go.
  • 01:48 We've now got banded columns and
  • 01:49 the interesting thing is we don't have to use these together either.
  • 01:53 I can actually turn off Banded Rows and leave just the Banded Columns on.
  • 01:56 These techniques can be super, super helpful for
  • 01:59 when you're working with really really large pivot tables you have large sets of
  • 02:02 data banded rows are really nice to be able to say hey this way I can trace it
  • 02:06 across without having to put a ruler on the page.
  • 02:08 And the same with the columns.
  • 02:10 The key thing really is that when you actually take a look through the styles
  • 02:13 gallery, the styles gallery is reacting live to all of the changes that you're
  • 02:17 making on the left hand side.
  • 02:18 So, you can always come back and say hey,
  • 02:20 this dark style is way down near the end here.
  • 02:22 This one looks like it has banded columns on it.
  • 02:25 But if I go and change this out to banded rows and get rid of the banded columns,
  • 02:29 let's go down and see does that still fit with what I actually want?
  • 02:32 So in this case, the dark blue pivot 27 gives me a format that looks like this.
  • 02:38 Ultimately, the color choice is years, but
  • 02:40 there's a lot of different ways that you can actually play with this.
  • 02:43 Don't be afraid to toggle those little checkboxes and see what happens, because
  • 02:46 it's definitely going to have an impact on the way that your pivot table looks.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.

Preserving Cell Formats on Update
03m:41s
Custom PivotTable Styles
05m:16s
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