Pivot Table Data Crunching for Microsoft Office Excel 2007

As on your standard spreadsheet in Excel, numbers in a pivot table can be formatted to fit your needs (for example, Currency, Percent, and Number). Rather than attempting to format the results of the pivot table using the formatting toolbar, you can easily control the numeric format of a field using the PivotTable Field dialog box. After you set the numeric format for a field, the numeric format will apply to all cells even after the report is pivoted into a new shape.

You'll notice that the PivotTable Field dialog box for data fields has a button on it labeled "Number." Click this button to access the Number tab of the Format Cells dialog box. Here, you can apply any standard or custom numeric format to your data items. Figure 3.5 shows the results of using a custom number format to display dollars in thousands.