Now, I am going to go back to the office theme. Now, it is still possible, even with all the different options in the styles gallery and the 20 different themes that none of those really do what you need. Excel gives you the opportunity to create your own pivot table themes. Let us say that we want to take this current them and change the stripe size from one row to two rows. We would go back to the design ribbon and open the gallery, find the theme that we are currently using. You will notice that it is highlighted. I will right click that theme and choose duplicate. Excel gives me a new theme and of course it uses kind of a strange name basically depending on to the old name.

So I am going to give this a name such as “My Style, Two Rows.” In the left list box are all the items that we can customize in this theme. As you scroll through, there are almost two dozen items that can be customized. In this case, we want to change the first row stripe and the second row stripe. I will choose first row stripe and change the stripe size to two. The second row stripe and change the stripe size to two. Now, when I click okay, you would expect that the pivot table would instantly update to reflect this new style but that does not happen. We are actually creating a brand new style and we have to go back to our gallery and choose new style. I click okay, no change to the pivot table that is expected.

We will go back, open the gallery and scroll all the way to the top. And, if our custom styles show up at the top, choose my style and now I have a style where each alternate color is two rows high. This new style I have created is available on this computer and it is available for all of our workbooks. If you want to share this theme with others, it is located in the up data folder under Microsoft, under themes. Simply copy that file from your computer to other people’s computers and you could basically create a company wide theme for people to use in their pivot tables.

If this is the theme that you like and you want all future pivot tables to use this particular theme, go back to your pivot table styles gallery, right click the style and choose set as default. All future pivot tables that you create will then have this style, so I will hit escape to close that.