Excel® 2007 PivotTables and PivotCharts

Chapter 6. Setting PivotTable Options

Apply a PivotTable Quick Style

In the Chapter 5 section “Format a PivotTable Cell,” you learned how to apply formatting options such asalignments and fonts to portions of a PivotTable. This works well, particularly if you have custom formatting needs. For example, you may have in‐house style guidelines that you need to follow. Unfortunately, applying formatting can be time‐consuming, particularly if you are applying a number of different formatting options. And the total formatting time can become onerous if you need to apply different formatting options to different parts of the PivotTable. You can greatly reduce the time you spend formatting your PivotTables ifyou apply a Quick Style instead.

A Quick Style is a collection of formatting options — fonts, borders, and background colors — that Excel defines for different areas of a PivotTable. For example, aQuick Style might use bold, white text on a black background for labels and grand totals, and white text on a dark blue background for items and data. Defining all these formats by hand might take a half an hour to an hour. But with the Quick Style feature, you choose the one you want to use for the PivotTable as a whole, andExcel applies the individual formatting options automatically.

Excel defines more than 80 Quick Styles, divided into three categories: Light, Medium, and Dark. The Light category includes Pivot Style Light 16, the default formatting applied to PivotTable reports you create, ...