Make a pivot table look beautiful with these formatting tips
Once you’ve made a pivot table you’ll often find it still needs a few touches before it is presentable. The first thing to fix are the field names. By default each metric in your table will have “sum of” prefixing each field (there may be circumstances where you have “count of” and other variations, often if data is not numeric)
Double click the field heading and you’ll be able to add a custom name. Beware that you can’t just delete the “sum of ” part of the name as this would create a duplicate name (some people like to add a space ” ” to the end of the name to get around this)
Next you’ll want to change the number formatting. Make sure percentages have %s and currencies have symbols etc. Doubleclick a column heading and choose number format from the menu that pops up.
Change fonts if you feel the need. My version of Excel uses Calibri and font size 12 as standard – but I prefer to use font size 9. But each to their own…
Next we’ll change the design…Click anywhere on the pivot table and then select Design from the ribbon menu. Choose something like Pivot Style Medium 15.
The table below shows two tables, exactly the same, only the one on the right has had some attention
Format a Pivot Table