Let’s take a look. Pivot table styles are available on the Design tab of the PivotTable Tools ribbon. To apply a pre-built style, select any cell in the pivot table and navigate to the Design tab. All available styles are listed in the PivotTable styles group. As you hover your mouse over each style in the group, Excel will build a preview of that style applied to your pivot table in the background. You can open up the styles group by clicking the arrow in the lower right. Pivot table styles are presented in three main categories - light, medium, and dark styles. When you find a style you like, simply click the style to apply it to your pivot table. If you’ve made any local changes to your pivot table formatting – for example, maybe you’ve highlighted certain numbers in the pivot table – you can optionally maintain or clear this formatting when you apply a style. By default, local formatting is maintained. But if you right-click a style, you’ll see that you actually have a choice: you can apply and clear formatting, or you can apply and maintain formatting. If we choose apply and clear, the highlighting we added is removed when the style is applied. The power of pivot table styles is that they continue to work even as your pivot table changes. For example, if we add the Category field to this pivot table, the pivot table expands, but the style is applied consistently to the entire table. If you decide you want to try a different style, just repeat the process and click another style. If you have a favorite style that you use frequently, you can set that style as the default for new pivot tables. Just right-click the style, and choose Set as Default. If you want to remove all styling from your pivot table, just select any cell in the pivot table and choose the first built-in style, in the upper left of the style list, which is called “none”.
Dave Bruns
Hi - I’m Dave Bruns, and I run Exceljet with my wife, Lisa. Our goal is to help you work faster in Excel. We create short videos, and clear examples of formulas, functions, pivot tables, conditional formatting, and charts.
