How to Customise Your Excel Reports With Slicers

At Happy we talk a lot about how great Pivot Tables are — and Slicers make your Pivot Tables and reports even better. With Slicers, you can have one Pivot Table that switches between different categories through the click of a button. In this blog, Ian gives step-by-step instructions with how you can create your very first Slicer.

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In his blog on Pivot Perfection, Darren showed us how to easily produce a series of Pivot Tables for each category we want to filter on. Slicers make it easy to have one Pivot Table that can switch between different categories.

Let’s start with the same data that Darren used:

Example data

The next step is to add a Slicer:

1. Go to the Options tab of the Pivot Table Tools on the ribbon

2. Click on Insert Slicer

Insert Slicer option

3.Choose the field you want to filter on, in this case Department

4. Click OK

5. A Slicer box will appear on your worksheet:

Example of a Slicer box

6. Click on the category you are interested in, for example, the Design department

7. The Pivot Table will update to show the values for that category:

8. To change to a different category, just click on the appropriate value in the slicer box

9. To select multiple values, do a normal click on the first value, then control-click on the other values:

Selecting multiple values

10. To clear the filter, click on the icon in the top-right corner of the Slicer box

Clearing your filter

11. You can move and re-size the Slicer box by clicking and dragging on the border of the box

Related Blogs

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Ian Balboa

Ian was an IT trainer with Happy from 2007 to 2018, first as a member of staff and then as an associate. He delivered IT training in Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook) as well as VBA, SQL, HTML and Photoshop.

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