Excel Dashboards and Reports For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 12

Adding Interactivity with Pivot 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 in a way that’s 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 worked your way through Chapter 6, “The Pivotal Pivot Table, 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 ...