Getting to know Excel 2010: Slicers

Simon Hurst explores the potential of the new Slicers tool that will be included in the next release of Excel.

I must admit to having been slightly underwhelmed when I first started experimenting with Slicers. However, having looked at a series of posts on the Excel Team Blog, the idea of Slicers makes a bit more sense.
Essentially a Slicer is a floating object that contains buttons for filtering a pivot table by all the values for a particular field. For example, the data that we used for our Northwind Invoice pivot table in the previous article on Excel 2010 Sparklines includes a ‘Country’ field.

If you select a cell in the pivot table and choose Slicer from the Filter group of the Insert tab, you can choose particular fields in the pivot table data from the Slider list. This creates a floating Slicer with a set of data option buttons. Clicking on a button filters our pivot table to show values for just that filter.

So far, this doesn’t seem a massive step forward – you could add the field as a report filter to do much the same thing without worrying about the new Slicer tool. However Slicers are all about making it easier to interact with pivot tables and making it easier to see what the pivot table is showing you. If you only select one option then the report filter will show the name of the country but if you select multiple countries, then it will just show ‘Multiple Items’ making it impossible to see at a glance what the pivot table is showing.