Category: Microsoft Office

Slicers you will be able to depict the datasheet fields more comprehensively. Excel 2010 include this feature for the first time, which lets you to slice your data by showing you only the element stored in the tables.  Real usage of Slicers can be seen with pivot table. Unlike Pivot table, which pivots down the datasheet, it makes you to compare and evaluate the data from different perspectives. This post will explain how you can use Slicer with Pivot Table and Charts.

 

To begin with, launch Excel 2010, and open a datasheet, containing Pivot Table.

We have made Pivot Table and Pivot Chart using the above datasheet.

The datasheet, containing fields; Software, Sales, Platform, and Month. Datasheet shows the software developed using two platforms (PHP, .NET), its price and month in which development completed.

Now we want to create slicers for each category present in Pivot table. For this, select the whole Pivot table, and navigate to Options tab, click Insert Slicer.

 

Upon click, Insert Slicers dialog will appear, containing fields of the Pivot table. Select the desired one from the list to view respective Pivot table and chart, and click OK.

You will see box of each field, containing data as shown in the screen shot below.

Now we want to view the software developed on PHP platform. For this, we will click PHP in Platform field box. You will see the pivot table and chart will automatically show all the info related to PHP platform, i.e, in which month it was used, which software developed on this platform and price of the software.

Now if we select August from Month field, then it will show all the info related with month of August, i.e, which platform was used to make which software, and what was its price.

By using Slicers you can filter down your data in more detail. Its real usage can be seen when you are dealing with huge data sheet.

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For those of you who like bulleted lists and are frustrated that you can’t insert one in a cell, there is a way to insert bullet points in a cell to emulate such a thing. Just keep in mind that this isn’t a true list, so you can’t generate more bulleted lines by inserting a new line – you have to insert a bullet character on each line. That said, here’s how you do it:

With your cell selected and in edit mode (reminder: press F2 to go into edit mode), position the cursor where you want a bullet point. Then press ALT+0149 to generate a bullet character. And, just to refresh your memory, to insert a new line in the cell you press ALT+Enter.

Hint If you’re doing this on a laptop, enable Num Lock so that you’ll have a numeric keypad to use. Otherwise, you’ll get just as frustrated as I did by trying to enter the ALT+0149 key combination by using the number keys in the number row on the keypad. What happens is that the Open dialog box is displayed after I press the 4 in the key combination. It seems that pressing ALT+4 opens this dialog box, so for some reason the 0 and 1 appear to be ignored. My pain, your gain.

On most laptops, to enable Num Lock, you press SHIFT+Num Lock or Fn+Num Lock. If your laptop (typically a smaller model, such as a netbook) doesn’t have a Num Lock key, see its documentation to learn how to enable it.

Here’s a cell with the bullet characters that I entered.