Slicers in Excel: The Ultimate Guide to Help You Design and Develop Excel Slicers

Slicers in Excel are implemented along with the Excel tables and pivot tables to act as one-click software filters to filter out the required information from an enormous collection of data within a fraction of seconds. 

By the end, you will have a comfortable understanding of the Excel Slicers and be capable of designing a few slicers in Excel all by yourself.

What Are Slicers in Excel?

Slicers in Excel are software filters used along with excel tables or pivot tables over a large amount of data. Not just filtering out the data, but slicers also help you with an easy understanding of the information being extracted and displayed on the screen.

Microsoft Excel Slicers is compatible with Windows and Macintosh operating systems. Moving forward, you will understand how to build Excel slicers in practical mode.

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How to Use Slicers in Excel?

The following two steps can be followed to include slicers in Excel tables or Excel pivot tables.

  • Step 1: Convert the data into a tabular format or a pivot table format.
  • Step 2: Select any cell of the Excel table or pivot table and insert slicers. 

Now, it’s time to look into the steps in a bit of detail.

Step 1

Convert the data into a tabular format or a pivot table format.

By default, Excel treats your data in the form of a database, and adding slicers would not be possible sometimes. So in your defense, you could directly start either by converting the data into a pivot table or simply an Excel table.

  • Select any cell from Excel to create a pivot table.

pivot-Original-data-Slicers-in-Excel

  • Navigate to the insert menu on the toolbar and select pivot table.

Piivot-Table-conversion-data-Slicers-in-Excel.

  • In the pivot table sheet, navigate to the insert option, select the option to insert slicers. 

Pivot-Table-conversion-data-Slicers-in-Excel

Now, try with the general Excel table.

Original-data-Slicers-in-Excel.

  • Press Ctrl + T keys together to convert the data to a table
  • Select the table range and press ok

Table-conversion-data-Slicers-in-Excel

  • The resultant table will look as shown below

Tabluar-data-Slicers-in-Excel

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Step 2

Select any cell of the Excel table or pivot table and insert slicers. 

Now insert the slicers. Inserting slicers is completely the same as inserting slicers in a pivot table.

  • Select any cell in the table
  • Navigate to the insert option on the toolbar

insert-menu-data-Slicers-in-Excel.

  • Select insert slicer

slicer-menu-data-Slicers-in-Excel.

  • A new window will appear asking for parameters. Select parameters and press ok

select-slicers-data-Slicers-in-Excel

  • The slicers will be available on the screen and ready for operations

slicers-data-Slicers-in-Excel

  • Try to filter the information using slicers, and the results should appear similar to the following image below

Output-data-Slicers-in-Excel.

Now, you will earn some of the crucial benefits of using slicers in Excel.

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Benefits of Using Slicers in Excel

Using slicers in Excel has proven to have multiple advantages and make life easier during real-time data analysis. A few important benefits are discussed below.

  1. The Slicer formulas, along with formulas, are easy to be copied or moved to different tables.
  2. Using Slicers, it is possible to get the required information with ease within a fraction of time, eliminating the brute-force method of manually filtering out the data.
  3. Slicers in Excel help in maintaining data security and integrity as the user is only interested in filtering out the necessary information but not mess with the actual data.

With this, you have come to an end of this tutorial on Slicers in Excel.

Wrapping Up

MIS Report in Excel can be your next step in learning data analytics. MIS Report plays a major role in generating real-time interactive reports, crucial in real-time data visualization and analytics.

Interested to learn more about Business Analytics? Or wish to get trained and certified to become a successful Business Analyst? Then feel free to reach out to the Business Analytics certification course from Simplilearn. Ranked among the five topmost business analytics courses, this Simplilearn program is offered in partnership with Purdue University is an outcome-driven training and certification program that helps you master the fundamental concepts of statistics and data analytics. 

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Have any questions for us on this tutorial on "DAX in Excel"? If you do, or maybe you have doubts about our certification course, do reach out to us by sharing them as comments below. Our team of experts will address them and will be happy to answer them at the earliest. 

About the Author

Ravikiran A SRavikiran A S

Ravikiran A S works with Simplilearn as a Research Analyst. He an enthusiastic geek always in the hunt to learn the latest technologies. He is proficient with Java Programming Language, Big Data, and powerful Big Data Frameworks like Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark.

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