Excluding a pivot filter item in Excel

Question

I'm pulling my hair at this one. I have a Table with some categories of data ("Income", "Health", "Housing", "Education", "Others") with their respective subcategories. When I create a Pivot Table, we have this categories as filters. But I don't want a certain category, let's say "Income", to show up in the filters menu neither do I want it to show in the pivot table. Is there any way to do it?

Answer 1

Due to low rep, I need to answer in order to clarify your question. Do you mean that "Income", "Health", "Housing", "Education", etc. are all categories of one column? In this case, you cannot have this particular field hide the items in your filters. You can, however, add a field in your table that looks like this (assuming your category field is in column A): =IF(A2="Income","",A2). Lets say that field is in column Z. give that field a column header you wish people to see, select your data source for the pivot table to not include the first column (column A) but include column Z. The user will be able to see an option for blanks but not know what that choice represents.

As an aside, if this is a privacy issue and you are wanting to report data via a pivot table but hide certain information, you must NOT include the sensitive information in your data source AT ALL. any sophisticated Excel user can obtain that sensitive data with ease. You are better providing a data set for these users to run their reports off of, which do not contain any of the sensitive information at all.