What we'll look at now is how to give our pivot tables a little bit different style
to what they have right now.
Every pivot table comes with a built-in default style.
What's a style?
It's essentially just a pre-packaged set of formatting that's applied to the actual
pivot table itself.
Now, the cool thing is that we're not stuck with this light blue, not a chance.
If we actually go up to the pivot tools Design tab,
you'll notice that there's actually a styles gallery here.
And if we click the little drop down arrow near the bottom, you can see there's
a whole bunch of different styles that you can actually play with for
your pivot tables.
There's light ones, there's dark ones, there's medium ones.
And the cool thing here is if we decide that there's one that we like to look at,
we can just go and say, hey, let's click on it and
see how it looks on our pivot table.
Now, the other thing though, that's interesting about the way this works is
that you have some pivot table style options over in the corner here.
So I could say uncheck Row Headers.
You'll notice that at this point,
it's actually stopped the shading on the alcohol and food here.
I could say uncheck the Column Headers, and
at that point my pivot table header goes back to this light blue.
You'll also notice the style gallery is actually showing the changes
live inside there.
So we can actually play around with these and say, okay, well after we start making
changes to the options, what does it actually do to the actual gallery?
What if we wanted Banded Rows?
We could click on that.
Now, in this style, it shows some kind of strange pieces here.
But what would happen if we chose a different style?
Could we see something slightly different?
Like maybe how about this one here?
And now you'll notice that we actually have banded rows showing up.
Let me turn the Row Headers back on.
It goes into bold in the style, and
the Column Headers will bring the header back on the pivot table.
What about Banded Columns?
There we go.
We've now got banded columns and
the interesting thing is we don't have to use these together either.
I can actually turn off Banded Rows and leave just the Banded Columns on.
These techniques can be super, super helpful for
when you're working with really really large pivot tables you have large sets of
data banded rows are really nice to be able to say hey this way I can trace it
across without having to put a ruler on the page.
And the same with the columns.
The key thing really is that when you actually take a look through the styles
gallery, the styles gallery is reacting live to all of the changes that you're
making on the left hand side.
So, you can always come back and say hey,
this dark style is way down near the end here.
This one looks like it has banded columns on it.
But if I go and change this out to banded rows and get rid of the banded columns,
let's go down and see does that still fit with what I actually want?
So in this case, the dark blue pivot 27 gives me a format that looks like this.
Ultimately, the color choice is years, but
there's a lot of different ways that you can actually play with this.
Don't be afraid to toggle those little checkboxes and see what happens, because
it's definitely going to have an impact on the way that your pivot table looks.