Slicing Pivot Table without a knife

We all, who have been using Pivot tables, know that we can easily use the filter arrows to easily narrow the no. of records and type or records that we wish to see.

But wouldn't it be better if we didn't have to tick and untick every time we had to expand or narrow our selections. Slicers are the perfect answer to this type of situation. Slicers are floating

Please refer to the following figure where we have created a Pivot table for some staff of a fictitious company called ABC travels Ltd.

Lets see how Slicer can help in easily analyzing our data.

Step 1: Choose Insert and click on the Slicer button

Step 2: Choose the fields you would like for the slicing by putting a tick mark in front of them and then press OK button.

Once the Floating Slicers are on the screen you can easily choose the Dept or Region in our example to quickly slice the data you are looking for. If however, you are seeking multiple Depts or Regions then you can easily keep the CTRL button pressed and then click on the relevant selection on the slicers.

I would like to leave you with the last thought. From the two figures below which is easier and simpler to understand. Figure 1 with filters or the Figure 2 with the Slicers:

Figure 1:

Figure 2:

The beauty of Slicers is that like many other features of 2007 and 2010 you can instantly see the changes you make.

Hope this was helpful for you and that you will vist this website for other new features and tipand tricks!

Don't forget to download your free manuals for all the Microsoft office packages and many more applications from MTC website. Office 2010 manuals are on their way really soon!

Excel 2010 - Introduction of Sparklines

Have you ever tried to analyze data in rows or columns? The answer is Yes Of course!! But How long will it take you to see how well or unwell have you performed if you had twenty columns of data?


Those who are familiar with Conditional Formatting feature of Excel would appreciate the enhancement made in Excel 2007 comparatively to Excel 2003. Conditional formatting is very effective when you are looking at one instance of the data. But what if you are trying to see a Even better feature called Sparklines are introduced in Excel 2010


Sparklines are a great new addition in Excel 2010. These are effectively charts that can fit in a cell that allows you to easily analyze your data.


Following are some samples of Sparklines:

As you see from above figures how easily you can analyze data Monthly, Quarterly or Annually.

You can even highlight the High points or low points in different colours.


There are mainly three types of Sparklines: Line, Column and Win/Loss



To create spraklines please follow these steps:


Step 1: Select all the data you wish to create the sparklines for. In our example mentioned above the selected data would be A1: D5.


Step 2: Choose Insert on the ribbon. Select the sparkline of your choice i.e. Line, Column or Win/Loss




Step 3: In the Create Sparklines dialog box select the location range by selecting the cells where you would like to place the sparklines. In our examples above it will be E1: E5.

Step 4: Press OK

I hope you enjoyed this article and would strongly advice you to got to MTC website to get free downloadable course manuals for any of the office packages and other products. Please click Free Manuals Link to directly go to the free manuals section. Course manuals for Office 2010 will be available in the near future.