Quickly Hide Selected Items in Excel Pivot Table

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.

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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.

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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.

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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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3 thoughts on “Quickly Hide Selected Items in Excel Pivot Table”

  1. Great tips, Debra. I use pivot tables a lot, but usually use the much slower method of activating the drop down boxes. [Aside…why the heck don’t pivottable filter drop down boxes open at the maximum size available so you can see as many options as possible, rather than having to resize them. Sooooo stupid, MS!]

    I hate the lack of conditional filtering in a pivot table… specifically when you’ve got a zillion things in a drop down filter, but only a handful in the pivot field…one of which you want to filter out. This trip removes that irritation.

    I find the lack of conditional filtering soooo damn irritating that I’ve resolved to make a custom filter using a listbox in a userform that is populated from the fields visible in the pivot table itself, when I get a chance. Have you heard of anyone else doing this? Hate reinventing the wheel…

    1. Thanks Jeff, and I haven’t heard of anyone creating an example of dependent filters in a pivot table. I’ll be interested in seeing what you come up with!

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