How To Delete Pivot Table in Excel (4 Efficient Ways)

Pivot Table is one big reason why statisticians, data engineers, actuaries, and other professionals from data-intensive fields of work would resort to Excel.

Even if you do not know coding or programming, still you can work out huge volumes of data in Excel using the Pivot Tables.

And all you need to do for this is have a fine grasp of how to construct a Pivot Table in Excel.

Pivot tables are undoubtedly great analytical tools that help you organize and summarize your data with a few clicks. And after you’ve analyzed the data as required, you may not want to keep the Pivot Table on your worksheet forever.

This is mainly because if you have huge amounts of data populated in your pivot table, it may hamper the performance of your workbook. It takes up large file space and can slow down the performance of Excel.

Excel users, therefore, prefer deleting Pivot Tables once they have sought the results they were looking for.

However, deleting a Pivot Table may not turn out to be as easy as creating a Pivot Table.

In this article, we will show you the four possible ways how you may delete a Pivot Table from your workbook with sheer ease. To learn more details about each of these methods, continue reading the article below.

1. Remove the Pivot Table Along with the Source Data

If you want to remove the pivot table along with the data contained therein, you can go with a number of methods to do so.

Consider the following pivot table:

Method # 1

The simplest way to delete such a pivot table is to delete the entire sheet that contains the subject pivot table and you are done. However, this method is only applicable if the sheet doesn’t contain any other data that you may want to preserve.

Method # 2

Another way to delete this pivot table is to activate any cell from this pivot table and press CTRL+A. Doing so will broaden the selection to the entire pivot table.

Next, press the delete key to get rid of the pivot table.

Pro Tip: If your Pivot Table consists of any filters, you may not want to opt for this method. 

Method # 3

Select the entire pivot table using the shortcut key ‘Ctrl+A’ and select the Clear All option through the following route.

Home Tab > Editing > Clear > Clear All

Method # 4

Using The Pivot Analyze Tab

• Click any cell in the pivot table.
• Select the Pivot Analyze tab.
• Click on the Select option.
• Select the Entire Pivot table from the drop-down list. The whole of the Pivot table will be selected by Excel.
• Press the Delete key from the keyboard, and you are done with deleting the pivot table along with all data

Method # 5

Using Shortcut Keys

Let’s bring your keyboard to action. You can also delete a Pivot Table in Excel by using a combination of different shortcut keys. To do so, follow these steps:

• Click any of the headers in the pivot table.
• Press CTRL + A to select the entire pivot table.
• Press ALT + E to open the Clear option.
• Press the A key, and the pivot table will vanish along with its data.

2. Delete the Pivot Table but Keep the Source Data

It is at times that after analyzing your data you want to keep the sorted data but not the Pivot Table itself.

For instance, if you have a large data file, the pivot table might become too heavy to bloat your workbook. Resultantly, you may want to remove the pivot table to reduce the size of your Excel workbook.

Let’s take the Pivot Table in the image below as an example. To remove the pivot table in the image below but keep the data, you may take either of the methods stipulated below.

Method # 1

• Activate any cell from the pivot table.
• Select the Pivot Analyze tab.
• From the Action group, choose the Select option.
• From the drop-down list, select the “Entire Pivot table” option. This selects the entire pivot table.
• Go to the Home tab.
• From the Clipboard group, select the Copy option to copy the entire Pivot table.
• Next, click on the Paste option or use the shortcut key ‘Ctrl + V’ after activating the cell where you want the data placed.
• In the drop-down menu for Paste options, select the ‘Value’ option.

Excel will remove the pivot table but keep the data contained in the Pivot table.

Method # 2

Another simpler way of deleting the pivot table while preserving the underlying data is through shortcut keys. Follow the steps listed below.

• Click any header of the pivot table.
• Press CTRL + A. to select the entire pivot table.
• Press CTRL + C to copy the pivot table.
• Press ALT +V to launch Paste options from the Ribbon area.
• Press V to remove the pivot table and paste the data values into respective cells. And you get only the resulting data from the pivot table.

3. Delete the Source Data but Preserve the Pivot Table

In the image below, a Pivot Table is created that consists of filters and headers for data analysis.

After using the analytical data from the pivot table, if you want to delete the resulting data while keeping the pivot table to use for data analysis later, follow the steps below.

Method # 1

• Select any cell from the pivot table. Select the Pivot Analyze tab.
• From the action group, choose the ‘Select’ option.
• From the drop-down list that then opens up, select the “Entire Pivot table” option to select the entire pivot table.
• Select the Clear option from the action group.
• A drop-down list will appear. Select the “Clear All” option from the list.
• It will clear the data inside your pivot table, and the pivot table is ready to use for newer datasets.

The data inside the pivot table has been removed, and the pivot table is ready to crunch newer datasets.

Method # 2:

Another simpler and faster way to perform the steps above is to use keyboard shortcuts. To delete data from your pivot table while keeping the pivot table using shortcut keys, follow the steps below.

• Click on any of the headers in the pivot table.
• Press CTRL + A to will select the entire pivot table.
• Select the Pivot Analyze tab.
• Select the Clear option from the action group.
• A drop-down list will appear. Select the “Clear All” option from the list.
• It will delete all the data values leaving the pivot table for the next data analysis.

4. Delete All the Pivot Tables from a Workbook

The above-mentioned methods work well when you have a single pivot table for your worksheet. What if you have multiple pivot tables on your worksheet? It may get super hectic to delete them all one by one.

However, to save you undue effort, we have a short VBA code that will help you delete all the pivot tables in your worksheet in one go.

The code is stated as follows.

Sub ClearPivotTables()

For Each ws In ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets

For Each PvtTable In ws.PivotTables

PvtTable.TableRange2.Clear

Next PvtTable

Next ws

End Sub

For example, to delete the following three pivots table simultaneously, you need to take the following steps.

To make the above VBA code work, follow these steps:

• Select the Developers tab. If you don’t see any Developers tab, you can get it by customizing your Ribbon options.
• Select the ‘Visual Basic’ option from the Ribbon.

• Excel will open up the VBA window.
• Select the Insert tab from the VBA window.
• From the drop-down list select the Module option to launch a module window.
• Copy-paste the above VBA code into this window.
• Close the window, and you are done.

To delete all the pivots tables from your workbook, click the play option from the VBA window. Excel will ask for your permission to run the code. Upon running the code, Excel will delete all the Pivot Table from your workbook in a snap.

Pro Tip:

Once the VBA code is run and the Pivot tables are deleted, you’ll not be able to restore them. So be sure when to use this code, and better create a backup copy to avoid losing these.

Conclusion

There are various methods to delete a pivot table or pivot tables in Excel. Whether you want to delete the entire pivot table along with the resulting data, or only want to delete the pivot table for your workbook to perform efficiently – this article elaborates on all the methods to delete Pivot Tables from Excel.

Keep coming back for more.