Pivot Table Tip: Color All One Type of Data Items at Once

Märt Parker — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 08:12:05 +0000

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:

Pivot tables created in Excel 2007 will not work in Excel 2003

Märt Parker — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 10:03:49 +0000

Excel has a very uncomfortable bug – if you create a Pivot table in Excel 2007, then it will be “readonly” in earlier versions. I.e you can’t apply any new filters or re-arrange data fields. The only picture you see is like a static snapshot of the moment when it was last saved in Excel 2007. Even saving in 2003 compatibility mode will not help. Somehow the creation algorithm of a Pivot table is different in Excel 2007.

What to do when you need to have a Pivot table which can be used for Excel 2003 and 2007 users at the same time? The only solution I know is to first create a Pivot table in Excel 2003. After that you can edit the Pivot in 2007, save modifications and it still works in both versions of Excel. So it is useful to have an older version of Excel available besides 2007.

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Pivot Table Tip: Color All One Type of Data Items at Once

Pivot tables created in Excel 2007 will not work in Excel 2003