Maintaining Formatting when Refreshing PivotTables

Summary: If you spend a lot of time formatting your PivotTable, only to see your formatting disappear when you refresh the PivotTable, it can be very frustrating. You'll want to make the change to the table options described in this tip in order to preserve your formatting work in the future. (This tip works with Microsoft Excel 97, Excel 2000, Excel 2002, and Excel 2003.)

PivotTables provide a great way to analyze large amounts of data and pull out the summarizations that you need. Once you have the PivotTable displaying the values you need, you can then format the table to make the data presentable--for a while. You see, when you update the data on which the PivotTable is based, and then refresh the PivotTable, all your formatting work may go away.

The way around this is to follow these steps:

Make sure that your PivotTable displays the values you want.
Format the PivotTable in whatever way desired.
On the PivotTable toolbar, choose Table Options from the PivotTable menu. Excel displays the PivotTable Options dialog box. (Click here to see a related figure.)
Make sure the Preserve Formatting check box is selected.
Click OK.

Now, when you refresh the PivotTable, your previously applied formatting should remain on rows and columns previously in the PivotTable. If the refresh results in new rows being added to the PivotTable, then you will still need to format those.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (3099) applies to Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

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Maintaining Formatting when Refreshing PivotTables