Pain Free Way to Hide Excel Pivot Table Items

Remember to enter the Excel 2010 Future of Productivity Giveaway -- it ends at noon (Eastern time) on Tuesday, June 8th. You could win a copy of Microsoft Office 2010 (with fancy new pivot table features), a Flip video camera, and a Seagate 1TB hard drive.

If you're working with an Excel 2007 pivot table, you might want to temporarily hide one or more of the items in a Row field or Column field. To do that, you probably click the drop down arrow for the Row or Column Labels, then remove the check mark for items you want to remove. That method works, but if the items aren't in ascending or descending order, it can be a pain to find the item you're looking.

Quickly Hide Items

Excel 2007 has enhanced filtering in pivot tables, and this can save you some time. Instead of searching through a long list of items in a drop down list, you can use a right-click command to hide the selected items. You can do this with one selected item, or several adjacent items.

1. Right-click on an item in the Row Labels or Column Labels
   
2. In the pop-up menu, click Filter, and then click Hide Selected Items.
   
3. The item is immediately hidden in the pivot table.

Quickly Hide All But a Few Items

You can use a similar technique to hide most of the items in the Row Labels or Column Labels. This is an even bigger time-saver than the Hide Selected Items trick.

1. Select the pivot table items that you want to keep visible
   
2. Right-click on one of the selected items
   
3. In the pop-up menu, click Filter, then click Keep Only Selected Items.
   
4. All but the selected items are immediately hidden in the pivot table.

Watch the Hide Items Video

To see the steps for quickly hiding or keeping the selected items in an Excel 2007 Pivot Table, you can watch this short video tutorial.

____________