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If you’ve been perusing the menu in Google Sheets, you may have noticed a tool called Slicer. This handy feature allows you to filter tables, graphs, or pivot tables in your spreadsheet . We will show you how to put them to use.
What is a slicer on Google Sheets?
As mentioned, you can use a segmentation to filter data. So you might be wondering how this is different or better than the filters available on Google Sheets.
That’s simple – a slicer can stay on your sheet, and with simple buttons you can filter the attached table or graph. This makes the tool ideal for manipulating data at a glance.
Yes use a filter in Google Sheets , you cannot save it for reuse. Alternatively, you can save a filter view in Sheets and reuse it whenever you want.
But with a slicer, you can set a default filter. This means that everyone who has leaf access they will see the filter already applied when they open the sheet. This is perfect for a custom dashboard that you configure for your team.
Add and use a slicer in Google Sheets
Now that you know what a slicer does, let’s take a look at how to add and use one.
Select the chart or table where you want to apply the segmentation. For our example, we will use a pie chart so you can see how easily the data is filtered. Go to the menu and click Data> Slicer.
Then you will see the cutter that looks like a floating toolbar. You can move it wherever you want on your sheet.
Then select a column to filter in the sidebar that is displayed. If you don’t see the sidebar, double-click the cutter to open it.
You should see the column labels for the data you used in the Column drop-down list. Select one and you will see it displayed on the cutter.
Click the filter icon or cutter drop-down arrow to apply a filter to that column. You’ll see that you can filter by condition, such as text that contains a keyword or values greater than a certain amount. You can also filter by value by deselecting the values you don’t want and leaving the ones you do want checked.
Click “OK” to apply the filter and you will see that your data and the graph or table are immediately updated. You can also see the number of filtered items in the segmentation itself.
Return to these locations to change or clean the filter as needed.
Edit or customize a slicer
You can change the dataset, the filter column, or the appearance of your slicer. Select the cutter, click on the three dots in the upper right and choose ‘Edit cutter’.
This reopens the Slicer sidebar with tabs for Data and Customize. Use the Data tab to adjust the data range or the Column drop-down menu to choose a different filter column.
Use the Custom tab to change the title, font style, size, format, or color, or alter the background color.
More slicer actions
When you select the cutter and click on the three points, you will see more actions. You can copy or remove the targeting, as well as set the current filter as the default.
Also, you can add more than one slicer to the same dataset. This allows you to configure multiple filters for multiple columns of data for your chart or table.
For a quick and convenient way to filter your table or chart data, and keep the filter visible, check out the slicer tool in Google Sheets.
If you also use Excel, have a look at how sort and filter the data there too!