In an Excel pivot table, you might want to hide one or more of the items in a Row field or Column field. To do that, you can click the drop down arrow for the Row or Column Labels, then remove the check mark for items you want to remove.

For example, to hide the data for 7-Feb-10, you'd click on the check mark to remove it.

A Quick Method to Hide Items

Instead of searching through a long list of items in a drop down list, you can use a quick command to hide the selected items.

1. Right-click on an item in the Row Labels or Column Labels
2. In the pop-up menu, click Filter, 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.

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 Pivot Table Tutorial 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.

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In Excel 2003, and earlier versions, the items in a page field’s dropdown list don’t have check boxes to indicate which items to show and which to hide. In the pivot table shown below, the Product field is in the page area.

It’s easy to select one product, such as Chocolate Chip. Or, you can select (All), and see the data for all the products.

However, you might want to hide some of the products instead of viewing the data for all the items. Without the check boxes, it’s not obvious how you can hide them.

Hide Some of the Page Items

Follow these steps to hide one or more of the page field items:

1. Double-click the page field button to open the PivotTable Field dialog box.
2. In the Hide items list, click on the items that you want to hide. In the screen shot below, Banana and Cheese will be hidden.

    3.    Click OK to close the PivotTable Field dialog box.
    4.    Until you unhide the items, the page field will show (Multiple Items) instead of (All), unless an individual item is selected.

Tip: You could temporarily move the page field to the row area, remove checkmarks for the items you want to hide, and move the field back to the page area.

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For more information on Pivot Tables, please see the Pivot Table Tutorials on the Contextures Website.

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A common problem in an Excel pivot table is that new items are added at the end of a drop down list. For example, in the following list, the Paper Clips item is at the end of the list, instead of appearing in alphabetical order.

This problem can be solved by sorting the field as described in my previous article – New Items at End of Pivot Table Drop Down Lists.

Error Message For Hidden Items

Usually, sorting the list quickly solves the problem, but I recently had an email from Martin tePoele, who had received an error message while trying to sort a field in his pivot table.

The message said: “Too many items are hidden. Unhide some items to continue.”

The field that Martin was trying to sort had over a thousand items, and only about 40 were selected. All the rest were hidden.

Limits in Excel 2003

I did some testing in Excel 2003, and discovered that 512 items seems to be the limit. If more than 512 items are hidden, you’ll get the error message when you try to manually sort the field.

However, I was able to programmatically sort the field, with 1000+ items hidden, without any problems. You could try this if you have more that 512 items hidden, and you don’t want to unhide them in order to sort the pivot field.

For example, the following code will sort all the pivot fields in ascending order.

‘==========================

Sub PivotSort()
Dim pt As PivotTable
Dim pf As PivotField
Set pt = ActiveSheet.PivotTables(1)

    For Each pf In pt.PivotFields
        pf.AutoSort xlAscending, pf.Name
    Next pf

End Sub

‘==========================

Hidden Items in Excel 2007

With the increased limits to pivot tables in Excel 2007, the problem seems to be fixed. I was able to hide 1000+ items in a pivot field, and could manually sort the field without getting the error message.

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For more information on Pivot Tables, please visit Pivot Table Topics index on the Contextures Website.

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