Pivot Table Tip: Color All One Type of Data Items at Once
Microsoft Excel’s styling capabilities have improved over the time. But there are still lackings on some areas. One thing I personally miss is the ability to attach styles to Pivot table items. For example you have in one table the sums of revenues and sums of quantities – and you wish the revenues to be formatted differently. Of course, you can manually change the formatting of each revenue cell, but this is not a very modern way to handle it – considering we use styles for such formatting tasks in MS Office and other programs nowadays.
I have a little tip for those of you who face the same problem – you can still attach different color to different Pivot table items. It is possible to use custom formatting to define the color of the Pivot table data item. This way all data of the same kind will be formatted with the same font color – resistant to table refreshes, size changes and field arrangements. And most importantly – you can change the color instantly from one place.
Field format is applied by right-clicking on the field name: Field settings -> Number
Then you should apply ‘Custom’ number formatting and define color format as shown on the screenshot below. This makes the text blue:
Below is a table of milk production data. One data item is made blue to distinguish it from the rest of the table:
