How to Refresh a Pivot Table in Microsoft Excel: Top 3 Methods
If you’re reading this blog, you must be an Excel user who wants to know how to refresh a Pivot Table. Now, every Excel user knows how essential Pivot Table is in Excel to effectively summarize a large dataset. But it has a catch—Pivot Table doesn’t refresh automatically.
This is the reason users often want to know the ways to refresh Pivot Table. In this article, we’ll discuss the 3 best techniques to refresh a Pivot Table. But first, have a look at the definition of a Pivot Table and what it can do.
What Is a Pivot Table?
In Microsoft Excel, a Pivot Table is a basic data analysis tool. The data this table contains can quickly answer crucial business questions. Its main purpose is to pass information easily. Though it only displays data in a table and doesn’t offer any real visualization, you can still consider it as a way of Visual Storytelling.
The function of a Pivot Table is to summarize, organize, sort, group, or count the total or average data of a table. It lets you convert columns into rows and vice versa.
Users can also perform tasks like advanced calculation and grouping by any column on Pivot Table. Moreover, this table can be used to view a list of unique values, locate the maximum or minimum value, or calculate the average. A Pivot Table is also useful to find out typos and other inconsistencies.
How to Refresh a Pivot Table
In the following section, readers will learn 3 different methods of refreshing a Pivot Table.
Method 1: Using Right-Click of the Mouse
- Click using the mouse on any cell inside the Pivot Table.
- Right-click and choose Refresh from the list of options.
- This approach will refresh the table, and you’ll see only the updated list with the latest changes.
Method 2: Using Pivot Options to Refresh During File Opening
- Put the cursor anywhere on the table.
- Go to the ribbon and select the PivotTable Analyze tab.
- Under the Pivot Table name, click on the Options drop-down menu to select Options to open the PivotTable Options dialog box.
- Instead of selecting the ribbon tab, you can also right-click on the table and select PivotTable Options.
- When the dialog box appears, select the Data tab.
- Check the box beside Refresh data when opening the file.
- Click on OK to apply this setting. From now on, the table will get refreshed every time you open the Pivot Table.
Method 3: Use Option From PivotTable Analyze Tab
- To begin with, open the PivotTable Analyze tab on the ribbon while working on a Pivot Table.
- Click on the Refresh drop-down and then choose Refresh.
- If your worksheet contains multiple pivot tables, you need to click on Refresh All option to refresh all the tables.
- This method will refresh the table and display updated data.
Conclusion
As you can see the importance of Pivot Table, refreshing it often becomes necessary to get the updated data all the time.
Now that you know how to refresh a Pivot Table, you shouldn’t have any trouble refreshing them whenever you want.
You may also be interested to learn more about how does Excel remove blank rows?
