How to Remove Totals from Pivot Table in Google Sheets

Pivot tables in Google Sheets are incredible for quickly summarizing thousands of rows of data, but they have one default setting that can often get in the way: they automatically add totals and subtotals. While helpful in some cases, these totals can clutter your report or even mess up your charts. This article will walk you through exactly how to remove row totals, column totals, and grand totals from your pivot tables in Google Sheets, giving you full control over your final report.

Why Would You Want to Remove Totals from a Pivot Table?

Before jumping into the "how," let's quickly cover the "why." Removing totals isn't just about personal preference, it often serves a practical purpose for clear and accurate data analysis. You might want to remove them for a few key reasons:

• Improved Clarity and Focus: Sometimes totals and subtotals distract from the specific data points you're trying to highlight. A clean table without extra summary rows can help your audience focus on the details that matter most. If you're analyzing individual product sales by region, the grand total might be irrelevant noise.

• Better Data Visualization: If you're creating a chart directly from your pivot table data, the "Grand Total" rows or columns can completely skew your visuals. Imagine a bar chart where one massive "Grand Total" bar makes all the other data points look tiny and insignificant. Removing totals first ensures your chart accurately represents the relationships between the core data points.

• Preparing Data for Further Calculations: You might use a pivot table as a staging ground for other formulas or analysis in your spreadsheet. If you do this, including totals can lead to errors like double-counting. For example, if you try to sum a column that already includes a subtotal and a grand total, your final number will be incorrect.

• Aesthetics and Presentation: For client reports, dashboards, or presentations, a streamlined table without extraneous totals often looks cleaner and more professional. It shows that you've intentionally formatted the data for easy consumption rather than just using the default output.

A Quick Refresher: The Pivot Table Editor

To remove totals, you’ll be working exclusively within the Pivot table editor, which usually appears on the right side of your screen whenever you click on a cell inside your pivot table. If it's not visible, just click anywhere in your pivot table, and it should pop up.

Let’s quickly review the key components you’ll interact with:

• Rows: This is where you drag and drop fields from your source data to group them vertically. Each unique value in this field becomes a row label.

• Columns: This works just like Rows, but it groups your data horizontally, creating column labels.

• Values: This is the data you're actually calculating or aggregating, like sales revenue, user count, or support tickets. This is where you decide if you want to SUM, COUNT, AVERAGE, etc.

The secret to removing totals lies entirely within the Rows and Columns sections of this editor. Each field you add to these sections has a simple checkbox that controls whether its totals are displayed.

Step-by-Step: How to Remove Row Totals in Google Sheets

Let’s start with the most common scenario: removing the subtotals that appear for your row data, as well as the final "Grand Total" row at the bottom of your table.

For this example, imagine you have a pivot table with "Region" and "Product Category" in the Rows section, summarizing "Sales" in the Values section. By default, Google Sheets will show subtotals for each region and a grand total for all sales at the very bottom.

Here’s how to get rid of them.

1. Select Your Pivot Table

Click any cell inside your existing pivot table. This will activate it and bring up the Pivot table editor on the right-hand panel.

2. Locate the "Rows" Section in the Editor

In the editor, find the area labeled "Rows." You'll see the fields you've added listed here. In our example, you'd see "Region" and "Product Category."

3. Uncheck "Show totals"

Underneath each field listed in the "Rows" section, you’ll see a small checkbox labeled "Show totals." By default, this box is checked.

Simply click the checkbox to uncheck it for the field whose total you want to remove.

• To remove the "Region" subtotals, you would uncheck the "Show totals" box under the "Region" field.

• To remove just the subtotals for "Product Category" within each region, you would uncheck the box under the "Product Category" field.

How This Removes the Grand Total Row

Here's a crucial point that confuses many people: Google Sheets handles the Grand Total for rows through the outermost row field.

In our example, "Region" is the highest-level grouping in our rows. By unchecking "Show totals" for "Region," you are not only removing the individual region subtotals but also eliminating the final "Grand Total" row at the very bottom of the table. If you only had one field in your Rows (e.g., just "Region"), unchecking its "Show totals" box would simply remove the Grand Total row.

Step-by-Step: How to Remove Column Totals in Google Sheets

The process for removing column totals is nearly identical. Let's say you've added a "Year" field to the "Columns" section of your pivot table to see sales broken down by year.

1. Open the Pivot Table Editor

If it isn’t already open, click any cell within your pivot table to open the editor panel.

2. Locate the "Columns" Section

Find the area labeled "Columns" in the editor. You will see your column fields listed here (in this case, "Year").

3. Uncheck "Show totals"

Just like with the rows, you’ll see a "Show totals" checkbox directly underneath the "Year" field.

Click this box to uncheck it.

Instantly, the pivot table will update, and the "Grand Total" column — which was summing up all the years — will disappear. If you had multiple fields in the Columns section, unchecking the outermost one would remove the final Grand Total column, while unchecking inner ones would remove their respective subtotals.

A Summary: Totals, Subtotals, and Grand Totals

To put it all together, here is the simple rule to remember:

• Row subtotals and the overall "Grand Total" row are controlled by the "Show totals" checkboxes in the Rows section of the editor.

• Column subtotals and the overall "Grand Total" column are controlled by the "Show totals" checkboxes in the Columns section of the editor.

To get a pivot table with no totals at all, you simply need to go through and uncheck every "Show totals" box under every field listed in both the Rows and Columns sections. It's that straightforward.

Practical Tips and Common Questions

Getting rid of totals is easy once you know where the checkbox is. Here are a few extra tips for using this feature like a pro.

How do I remove subtotals but keep the Grand Total?

This is an excellent question. Let's go back to our example with "Region" and "Product Category" in the rows. Say you don’t need to see the subtotal for each "Product Category," but you do want to keep the final Grand Total at the bottom. Here's how:

1. Make sure you have at least two fields in your "Rows" section (e.g., "Region" is listed first, then "Product Category").

2. In the Pivot table editor, find the inner field ("Product Category" in this case) and uncheck its "Show totals" box.

3. Leave the "Show totals" box checked for the outer field ("Region").

Because you left the totals on for the outermost field, Google Sheets will still calculate and display the final Grand Total row, even though the inner-level subtotals are now hidden. This gives you more nuanced control over your report's layout.

What if I want to re-add the totals?

No problem. Just go back to the Pivot table editor, find the field(s) in the Rows or Columns section, and re-check the "Show totals" box. The totals will reappear instantly. You can toggle them on and off as much as you need while you fine-tune your report.

A Quick Alternative: Using the GETPIVOTDATA Function

Sometimes, you don't even need the full table structure — you just want one or two specific values from the pivot table's calculation to display elsewhere in a dashboard. Instead of creating a pivot table and then hiding all the totals and extra data, you can use the GETPIVOTDATA formula.

It lets you pull a specific value directly from a pivot table based on the criteria you provide. For example, you could write a formula to pull only the total sales for "Electronics" in the "North" region without worrying about formatting the table itself. It's a more advanced technique but extremely useful for creating clean summary reports.

Final Thoughts

Removing totals from a pivot table in Google Sheets is a fundamental skill for anyone who wants to create clean, focused, and accurate reports. By simply unchecking the "Show totals" boxes in the Pivot table editor's Rows and Columns sections, you gain precise control over your table's layout, making your data easier to analyze, visualize, and present.

While mastering pivot tables is a huge time-saver, we know that the ultimate goal is to get answers, not just build reports. The process of connecting data, creating pivot tables, removing totals, and formatting everything still takes up valuable time. We created Graphed to automate that entire manual workflow. You can just connect your data sources directly and ask questions in plain English, like "show me sales by product category in a bar chart for last quarter," and get an instant, real-time visualization without touching a spreadsheet.