Excel 2010 Slicers for Tables (not Pivot Tables)

Excel 2010 Slicers

I’ve been doing a lot of work with Excel 2010 and the Table feature lately. One of the things that I would love to incorporate into Tables is the handy Slicers available in Pivot Tables. I hoped to be able to use the Slicer technology in a table rather than having to create a Pivot Table. Sadly, this is not possible. But, don’t let that deter you. It’s really quite simple to turn your Table into a Pivot Table that shows the data in a similar fashion. Then use the Slicer normally. See below for an example and instructions.

A table has the advantage of showing each line-item as a row whereas a Pivot Table does not allow for this sort of data display. Each field you add to a Pivot Table creates an item with subtotal items below it. The trick is to leave off the field or fields you want to “slice”. For example. We do SEO work here at Acumen and one thing I try to keep track of what keyphrases are useful for each of our pages. This table includes three columns, the Page, the Keyphrase, and the Site.

So, I create a Pivot Table with the Page as the first item with each Keyphrase listed underneath. Then I add the Slicer for the Site. Thus I can click on whichever site desired and see the pages and keyphrases associated with it. I might even think about just having the Keyphrases as the list and using both Page and Site as Slicers.

It’s a bit of a cumbersome workaround until Microsoft decides to make Slicers available for tables but will have to do.

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