Recording a Macro

Firstly, the recording: Select a cell in your Pivot Table and then click the Record Macro control in the Macros group at the extreme right of the View tab.

Make sure that the Store macro in: setting is This Workbook and click the OK button. Now you have to record your refreshing the Pivot Table; just right-click the active cell and choose Refresh from the shortcut menu. The recording is now completed and you have to turn off the macro recorder by clicking the Stop Recording control in the Macros group on the View tab.

The next job is to find the recorded code and copy the instruction that refreshes your Pivot Table. Click the View Macros control in the Macrosgroup on the View tab, select your recorded macro from the list and then click the Edit button on the right hand side. You will now see your recording displayed in the Visual Basic Editor, it should look something like this:

Now, exit the Visual Basic Editor and return to Excel by clicking an Excel icon or by pressing ALT+F11.

Right-click the tab

Next, you need to find the Events for the worksheet where your Pivot Table is located. Every Excel worksheet has a collection of event-driven macros which trigger automatically whenever a particular event occurs. For example, the Selection Change event is triggered whenever you click a cell on the worksheet. We are going to use the Activate event to make our Pivot Table refresh.

Right-click the worksheet tab and choose View Code from the shortcut menu. You are returned to the Visual Basic Editor once again but this time the screen looks blank. Don’t let that put you off, looking at the top of the active window you will see two drop-down lists.

The drop-down list on the left hand side is the Object list, the one on the right hand side is the Procedure list.

Firstly, you go to the Object list on the left and select the Worksheet object and then you will be able to choose a suitable event from the Procedure list on the right.

The Procedure list, on the right hand side

All objects have default events and these usually appear in the window automatically, ignore them and scroll up the list to select the Activate event. Paste your recording into the event procedure so that it looks like this:

Paste your recording into the Event

The Activate event is triggered whenever you make that worksheet active, so in order to test that the procedure is working correctly you need to perform the event.

Return to the Excel workspace by clicking an Excel icon or by pressing ALT+F11, select another worksheet in the workbook and then return to the original worksheet where the Pivot Table is stored. This triggers the event and you will see that the tables are automatically refreshed. The best test is to change something in your source data and then see if your Pivot Table updates to reflect the change.

Using your Macro Again

To find out the name of a specific Pivot Table, right-click one of its cells and choose Pivot Table Options from the short cut menu.

Recording Refresh All

If you have several Pivot Tables that need to be refreshed then it is quite in order to list the various Pivot Tables one after the other in your macro but it is probably best if you recorded Refresh All in which case the initial recording would like the illustration on the right.

Saving your file

When your Excel workbook file contains macros remember to save the file in the Excel Macro-Enabled Workbook format.

If you want to have your Pivot Table source data range updated automatically see Automatically change Excel Pivot Table source data range

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