Supposing, I have the following data source, and now, I change the Coconut to Apple, and refresh the pivot table, but, the old Coconut item still appear in the filter drop down list, see screenshot: To clear the old items from the filter drop down in the pivot table, you should do as follows: 1. Our goal is to help you work faster in Excel. From now onward you don’t have to suffer from these annoying Excel pivot table problems. What I did was: 1) I changed the data source for the pivot. I would like to suggest you check the following: The solution was to include the Forename field in the pivot table (it was not used in the pivot table, just in slicers). Display field captions and filter drop downs Select or clear to display or hide PivotTable captions at the top of the PivotTable and filter drop-down arrows on column and row labels.. Classic PivotTable layout Select or clear to enable or disable dragging fields on and off of the PivotTable.. Show items with no data on rows Select or clear to display or hide row items that have no values. Apply Accounting number format Apply Accounting number format Set pivot table options to use zero for empty cells expression.ShowAllItems. Example. Tips: To quickly display or hide the current subtotal, right-click the item of the field, and then select or clear the check box next to Subtotal "