How to Create Slicers and Timelines in Excel?

Slicers and Timelines in Excel are used to implement with the Excel tables and Pivot Tables to help in filtering out large amounts of data to get the high level of information from a collection of data. 

Finding Slicer and Timeline in Excel

Navigate to the Insert menu ribbon, Select the Filters section in the dropdown you can see Slicer and Timeline. 

Let’s understand more about Slicers and Timelines 

How to Use Slicers in Excel?

Steps to use Slicers in Excel 

Step 1: First we need to convert all the data into a tabular format or a Pivot Table format because it is impossible sometimes to directly apply slicers to data so first to need to convert them into a pivot table or simply in table form.

Step 2: Create Pivot Table 

• Navigate to the Insert menu on the toolbar under the Tables section select PivotTable.

• A Dialogue box is open as shown below now select Table/Range of table.

• After that click “OK” you can see Pivot Table is created in the next sheet of the excel file.

Step 3: Now to create Slicers select any cell in the table Navigate to the insert option on the toolbar then Select insert Slicer.

• A new window will appear asking for parameters. Select parameters and click on “OK”.

• Now Slicers will be displayed for filter operations.

How to Create Timelines in Excel? 

The Timeline is mainly used to represent/filter the time span like years, dates, months, minutes, hours, etc. 

Steps to create Timelines in Excel

Step 1: First, create a Pivot table for the given data. 

• Click on any cell in the table and go to the Insert tab. Click on the Pivot Table option under the Tables section.

• A Dialogue box is open as shown below now select a Table/Range of table

• After that, you can see Pivot table is created in another sheet, as shown.

Step 2: Now to Create Timeline.

• Click anywhere in the Pivot table and go to the Insert tab. Click on the Timeline filter under the Filters section.

• An Insert Timelines dialog box. Select parameters and click on “OK”.

Note: If you find this below dialogue box it means Pivot Table doesn’t have a field formatted as a Date, So it is compulsory to add a date column in the table for using Timelines.

Step 3: After that, you can see Timeline will be created by default month-wise.

You can select the months accordingly by clicking on this timeline bar.