One Click Filters Everything: Excel Slicers for Dashboards

The dashboard shows the whole business. A manager wants to ask: and the West alone? And furniture, in 2025? A slicer answers that with one click. In Lab 7 we add four, and connect them so every number follows.

One thing to know about Excel for the web

In Excel for the web, a slicer is created on the sheet of the PivotTable you insert it from, and cannot be moved to another sheet. So we add a small helper PivotTable on the Dashboard sheet itself (at Y3, with Region in Rows) and insert the slicers from it.

Step 1: Insert the slicers

Select a cell of the helper PivotTable, Insert → Slicer, and tick Year, Quarter, Region and Category.

For each slicer: right-click, Slicer Settings, then the number of buttons per row, the size and the position. Line them up at the left of the cards.

Step 2: Connect them to every PivotTable

A slicer filters only the PivotTables it is connected to; so far that is just the helper. Open each slicer’s PivotTable Connections and tick the others: KPI, Region, Category, Category Profit, Segment and Top.

One design decision: the Region slicer is not connected to the revenue-by-region PivotTable, because a region chart that shrinks to one column when you pick a region tells nothing.

How you know it worked

Select West: every card changes at once, revenue $657,166, and the trend and doughnut show the West only.

Add 2025 in the Year slicer: West in 2025 is $357,196, the number calculated by hand with SUMIFS in Lab 3. The dashboard and the independent formula agree.

Handy to know

• Ctrl + click selects two buttons, for example West and East.
• Clear Filter (right-click, or the funnel at the slicer’s corner) brings the whole business back.
• A timeline filter for dates can only be created in the desktop app; in the browser, Year and Quarter slicers do the job.