Advanced Capabilities of Pivot Tables and Slicers

Now that you have the basics covered in how to manage your data using pivot tables, it is time to kick it up a notch and explore some of the advanced capabilities of the pivot table.

In this video, we explore the different ways the pivot table can be manipulated to enhance the visualisation of data and to create sophisticated dashboards.

You already discovered that you can add and connect slicers to one or multiple pivots. Creating dashboards does not end with adding and connecting slicers.

Depending on the level of data in your pivot, you can move between and visualise high-level and granular data. For example, if you are displaying progression across a timeline as a line chart, you can view data for the entire period (year) or month to month.

Slicers are a great tool to use in your dashboards. But what about filters? Remember that you can still use your field list, in addition to your slicers, to filter your data. Slicers and filters can complement each other when used together in a dashboard. Slicers are very visual but not so useful for large amounts of data. Filters can help you manage your data sets better.

Let’s do some reflecting and recapping.

Take a moment to review the following resource which gives a broader overview of how to use slicers to filter pivot data.

• Slicers to filter Pivot Table data

Join the discussion

Imagine you’re a business owner, and you had to create a dashboard. Where would you start? Make a checklist for creating a dashboard. Did the information you learned up to this point help you while you were making your checklist?