Excel Dashboards and Reports, 2nd Edition

Chapter 16: Adding Interactivity with Slicers

In This Chapter

• Understanding slicers

• Creating and formatting standard slicers

• Using Timeline slicers

• Using slicers as command buttons

Slicers allow you to filter your pivot table, similar to the way Filter fields filter a pivot table. The difference is that slicers offer a user-friendly interface, enabling you to better manage the filter state of your pivot table reports. Happily, Microsoft has added another dimension to slicers with the introduction of Timeline slicers. Timeline slicers are designed to work specifically with date-based filtering.

In this chapter, you explore slicers and their potential to add an attractive as well as interactive user interface to your dashboards and reports.

Understanding Slicers

If you’ve worked your way through Chapter 14, you know that pivot tables allow for interactive filtering using Filter fields. Filter fields are the drop-down lists you can include at the top of your pivot table, allowing users to interactively filter for specific data items. As useful as Filter fields are, they’ve always had a couple of drawbacks:

→ Filter fields are not cascading filters. They don’t work together to limit selections when needed.

For example, look at Figure 16-1. You can see that the Region filter is set to the North region. However, the Market filter still allows you to select markets that are clearly not in the North region (California, for example). Because the Market filter is not in any way ...