Dressing up your Slicers

In the last part of this 3 part series on slicers I’ll show you how slicers can be customized many different ways to create stellar looking reports.

Previously in this series:

Part 1: Easy (and Even Fun!) Data Exploration: Introducing Excel 2010 Slicers

Part 2: Interacting with Slicers

Slicers use styles the same way tables and PivotTables do, in light and dark options:

The default light style is shown below on the left. In order to use custom font, colors, and borders I can either start from scratch or make a copy of an existing style to tweak.  Shown below on the right is a copy of the default light slicer style with a few changes.

In order to create this custom style, I first reduced the font of the whole slicer.  Since the four button types (selected/unselected, data/no data) still used the original font size, I cleared the settings of each of these so they would inherit the font from the whole slicer, and then lightened the colors a bit. Finally, I decreased the button size.

With custom styles, you can achieve a wide variety of different looks:

Your custom styles show up in the ribbon, so you can quickly reuse them on other slicers.  If you want to share your styles with others or use them in new documents, just save the file as a template the same way would for table or PivotTable styles.

Independently of the styles you use, you can also tweak the settings for the size of the slicer, the size of the buttons, and number of columns:

Let’s take another look at how slicers look when integrated with a report:

And don’t forget- you can apply different themes, which skin all your formatted cells, charts, tables, and slicers in one click.