A Pivot table is a powerful feature that every spreadsheet user should learn how to use. Besides learning the technical aspects of using a pivot table, it may also be helpful to learn some basic formatting options that you have with your pivot table.
There are a few different options that you have for adjusting the format of a pivot table in Google Sheets. You can change things like font, fill, number format, and more to give your pivot table a customized look.
There are also themes that you can use to quickly adjust your pivot table.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to format a pivot table in Google Sheets.
Table of Contents
Changing Pivot Table Format Using Themes
You can use the built-in themes option in Google Sheets to quickly change the formatting of your pivot table, or you can even customize your theme.
Changing Themes
Here are the steps to change the theme of your pivot table:
1. In the top menu select Format>Theme
2. You should now see all of the theme options appear on the right-hand side. Select the theme that you want.
3. Your pivot table will now update to the formatting of the new theme that you have selected
Customizing Your Theme
Instead of choosing one of the default themes, you can also customize a theme.
In the top menu select Format>Theme
Then in theme editor on the right-hand side select Customize
You will now see all of the customization settings that you can change. You can change the font, text color, background color, and accent colors here.
Changing Pivot Table Format Manually
If you want greater control over the finer details of your pivot table format, changing it manually is the best option.
You can change the number format by highlighting the numbers that you want to change the format of and then selecting Format>Number. From here you will find a list of options for the different kinds of number formats you can select from.
Formatting as currency, percentage, increasing or decreasing decimal places, font format, font size, fill color, and text color can all be changed in your pivot table through the top section in the toolbar.
You can find the rest of the formatting options under Format in the top menu.
Closing Thoughts
As we have covered in this guide, there are a few different ways that you can customize the format of your pivot table. Changing the format manually is great because it allows you greater flexibility on what can be changed, however, the downside of this is that sometimes when you add in new rows or columns into your pivot table you may need to update the formatting again.
The benefit of using themes is that the changes will stay in place as your pivot table as updated, so you won’t have to update twice. However changing and customizing your pivot table theme does not give you as much control over the format as doing it manually.
More Google Sheets Tutorials:
How to Use Slicers
How to Group a Pivot Table by Month
How to Remove Grand Total from a Pivot Table