Filter table data interactively with slicers - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

- Let's look at slicers. They are a valuable way of filtering your data. They make filtering easy. You don't have to deal with those drop down arrows and click boxes and whatnot like you do in the auto filter. So, let's get into it. My cursor is in the data set and in order to use slicers the data does have to be in a table. All right, format as table, let's grab that style. The table does have hitters and let's scroll down and make sure that we have all of our data here. Yes, we do. And click okay. And then get rid of the filter buttons. Now with the cursor in the data set, I'm going to go to insert slicer. Now we have to pick which column we want to have a slicer for. If we pick the first or last name there's going to be too many in the slicer. So, you got to be strategic about how you pick what you want a slicer for. We want one for state. We want one for method of payment and tax receipt sent. Okay. Now let's position them to where they're useful. Okay. Good. Good. And I'm going to show you some really neat stuff here. Watch. So, here is the one for state and it goes all the way down here. All right, one thing we can do with the slicer selected, we've got a slicer tab on the ribbon, click away from the slicer. It goes away. Click back, slicer. I want to change this to let's say two columns. See how three columns work. Okay. That means less scrolling rather than having this really long slicer, we've got this shorter slicer, but it's wider. Okay. And then we can even turn this one into two columns. Okay. Let's move this up with this off to the side a bit. Now we can look at, say, what about Florida donations? Okay. There are the Florida donations. Also notice in the slice of a tax receipt sent blank has grade out. It is no longer an option because every Florida transaction, the tax receipt has been sent out. Also look at the method. There have been no cash or debit card transactions for Florida and no blanks for missing data. So, we can clear this. All right. And now let's look at the blanks here. These are the two transactions that don't have a payment method. Jerry Swain donated $200. Somehow we've got to figure out if there was a check or this $200 bills floating around somewhere, but the tax receipt has been sent out. Oh, and there's no state. Okay. Let's clear this slicer. Now notice in the state column there are blue highlighted sales for states that are considered in the home region. If we go into the table and bring back the filter buttons, we can filter by color. We cannot do that with a slicer. We can't filter for contains or begins with or ends with, but we can do it with the auto filter menus we can use begins with, contains, et cetera. And what happens if we do filter by color and grab those. Interesting. These all went white and let's clear the filter. Now let's see what happens if we go to state and then click for the blanks. And then we realize Sanford Lee is actually in Montana. MT, enter. Did you see that? Now we have an MT. Slicer did that for us. So, here again, let's clear the filter. Now I want to look at who donated with a credit card or a debit card. I'm going to select the method slicer and then hit these check marks. And I'm going to click cash because I'm not interested in those. I'm not interested in check and I'm not interested in blank. So, now I am left with the donations that were made by a card, scroll down, check it out. And then we can see that we've got Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, et cetera, as states that we can click on. But then the CT, NY, VA, et cetera for Connecticut, New York, Virginia, they are not available for us to select, but we can go ahead and click Kentucky if we like and Hawaii, Texas. And let's clear the filters. And this is how you can work with your data set easily filtering your data with slicers.