Hidden Formatting Tricks for Slicers

How to transform Slicers from chunky to sleek, stylish, overcoming challenges posed by default sizing.

Whether you're building intricate Excel dashboards or just looking for ways to enhance your data presentation, this guide is for you.

🍿WATCH RELATED LESSONS NEXT:
==============================

WHO AM I?
=========
If we haven't met yet, hi! 👋 I'm Mynda Treacy. I'm a CIMA qualified accountant turned Excel and Power BI trainer. In 2014, and every year since, I've received the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award for my contribution to the Microsoft 365 community. I love sharing Excel and Power BI tips and techniques that will get you noticed and promoted. Follow me for a new video every week.

🎓LEARN MORE
==============

🔔 SUBSCRIBE if you’d like more tips and tutorials like this.

📢 Please leave me a COMMENT. I read them all!


🎁 SHARE this video and spread the Excel love.

Or if you’re short of time, please click the 👍

⏲ TIMESTAMPS
==============
0:00 The problem with Slicers
0:31 Custom Slcier Styles
1:46 Applying Slicer Styles
3:06 A Cool Trick!
3:39 Fixing Annoying Features

[tristangeoffroy]

Thank you for this thorough review of slicer design that can improve so much user experience.
I like your idea of make it like a menu, or inserting it into a graph.
… and also to your comment. Thank you

[Quidisi]

Great video. I've spent way too much of my life messing with slicers.
One thing to note, if you turn off the slicer display header (and hence lose the multi-select and the clear-filter buttons), you can still reset the slicer WITHOUT having to select each slicer button.
With only 1 button selected (doesn't work if you have more than one button selected) just Ctrl+click the button that is already selected, and now they all will be selected (equivalent to having clicked the "clear filter" button in the header that you have hidden)

[robertcooper]

Oh Mindy, you're lovely - you really know your stuff.

[erdal]

That's exactly what I was looking for.
Thanks Mynda.

[itachiUchiha-ue]

Thank you Mam the Tutorial was Great. Please Make more tutorials on None productive time report and production loss analysis report 😊

[dannypuype]

When hiding the header, right clicking the slicer gives you the option to clear the filters

[TheJoshtheboss]

Your ingenuity never ceases to amaze me. Always love coming back to your Excel content, especially dashboards, power query and pivot tables and charts 😊

[joannablack]

I would love to see something similar for Power BI! for an application designed for data visualization, I find the lack of formatting options for slicers (or obvious options anyway...) very frustrating

[kkf]

Instead of unchecking the Header box you can just remove text in the Header Caption. This way you will have your clear filters available, although you will still have a line above the slicers.

[ivanbork]

Hi Mynda
Very good and useful tricks, thanks.
And please, allow me to comment that I’m glad to see a video that is just about the subject without any noise.

[AjayKumarparmar]

Could you please advise which software you have used to record this. I like minimizing and full screen of your physical appearance in the video. It was very smoothly transitioned

[amad_ksa]

thanks 😊❤⤵
Video summary [00:00:00][^1^][1] - [00:04:59][^2^][2]:

The video provides seven hidden formatting tricks for slicers in Excel, focusing on creating compact and stylish slicers for user-friendly interactive reports. It demonstrates customizing slicer styles, adjusting font sizes, removing borders for overlapping, and other techniques to optimize space and improve the visual appeal of Excel dashboards.

**Highlights**:
+ [00:00:00][^3^][3] **Custom Slicer Styles**
* Create custom styles for compactness
* Adjust font size and style for smaller buttons
* Remove borders to allow overlapping
+ [00:01:59][^4^][4] **Applying Formatting**
* Apply new style to all slicers with a shortcut
* Reduce button size and width for space efficiency
* Overlap slicers slightly without visible borders
+ [00:02:41][^5^][5] **Header and Filter Button**
* Hide headers when unnecessary
* Use alternative methods to clear filters
* Consider the trade-off of header removal
+ [00:03:06][^6^][6] **Slicer as Sheet Tabs**
* Make slicers resemble sheet tabs
* Draw a line shape for a page-top appearance
* Add a drop shadow for a finishing touch
+ [00:03:54][^7^][7] **Preventing Accidental Changes**
* Disable resizing and moving to prevent mishaps
* Avoid accidental activation of pull handles
* Ensure slicers remain neatly positioned
+ [00:04:15][^8^][8] **Grouping Dates in Slicers**
* Hide unwanted grouped date items
* Use slicer settings to hide items with no data
* Workaround for single-item selection in slicers

[Ugk]

Thank you very much for the sharing. Now i know that i didnt click set as default

[koa]

instead of whole slicer, whole table pops up for me

[shoppersdream]

Mynda, do you have any videos on Pivot Table Two-Level Slicer? It is mainly because my Column has too much data. Thanks

[davidhampson]

Hi If you want quite a few slicers on a data pivot table...but you want them smaller than the default...Can you somehow set them to a size that then remains each time you open a new slicer?

[Rice]

The main annoying feature of slicers that you cant track its changes, so you need to make additional table with tracking its values.
Thanks for video, i also have no enough time to dig deeper into slicers settings.🤭

[learnspreadsheets]

This is brilliant! Wish you had more resizing capabilities but oh well

[PWH]

Absolutely gutted, was so excited when I found this - only to realise it doesn't work on MAC 😢

[shoppersdream]

This was nice, thanks! Excel works best on Windows and I have a Mac, so many things do not work on Mac.