How can I remove the expand/collapse buttons for only some fields in an Excel pivot table?

Question

I have a lot of pivot tables populated from SSAS cubes. Some have expand/collapse buttons for only some of their fields (not the first or second field but then for every other field).

I know how to enable and disable expand/collapse buttons for the whole pivot table (e.g. Excel Pivot Table - Deactivate colapse/expand function), but I would like to be able to remove the expand/collapse buttons for just some of the columns in my tables.

The only information I've been able to find about why some fields might not show expand/collapse buttons when they are enabled for the pivot table is this little comment on Microsoft's support page about enabling and disabling expand/collapse buttons:

NOTE: Expand and collapse buttons are available only for fields that have detail data.

An acceptable answer might be just to explain what that note means :)

Solution

No, it's not possible to do this.

The comment you've picked out from Microsoft's support page is simply saying that +/- buttons won't be displayed if there aren't any more child fields to expand to (even if +/- buttons are set as active).

So, if you only have one field in your rows/columns, there will be no +/- buttons. Or, if you have 3 fields selected, the first 2 will have +/- buttons, but the last field will not, because there is no more detail to expand.

Comments

[Nikita Chernykh]

That's disappointing. I would like to do this too on columns where I know there will only be one child underneath so there is nothing to expand/collapse. It's distracting when you have columns just supplying additional details about the same entity