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Abstract 

In this video, we show you how to create and use your own slicer styles.

Transcript 

Like pivot table styles, pivot table slicers have their own framework for creating and applying visual styles.

Let’s take a look.

Slicer styles are available on the Slicer Tools ribbon. They control the color and style used to display slicers. As with pivot table styles, there are a wide variety of styles available, each with a distinctly different look.

To apply a slicer style, select the slicer and then click one of the thumbnail images.

Although you can create a new slicer style from scratch, usually it’s easier to start with an existing style that’s close to what you want. To illustrate, let’s apply the existing dark orange style.

Note that this style uses a yellow gradient with black text to highlight hovered items. Let’s make our own version of this style that displays hovered buttons in green with white text.

By design, you can’t modify a built-in style directly. If you right-click the style in the menu, you’ll see the Modify item is dimmed.

We need to first duplicate the style. To duplicate a style, right-click and choose Duplicate from the menu. Now, let’s name the new style Custom Orange.

Slicer styles control five main areas of formatting: the slicer background, the header, selected items, unselected items, and hovered items. Hovered items control the look of buttons when a mouse cursor hovers over them.

To change the color of hovered buttons to green, we’ll edit the fill and font settings for Hovered Selected Item with Data. Note that the small preview thumbnail shows hovered styles on the right and is updated in real time as you change styles.

When we click OK, nothing happens - the slicer looks the same as before. That’s because our new style is not yet applied to any slicer.

Custom styles will appear in the upper left of the styles list. Just select a slicer and click the custom style in the ribbon.

Now we see the green hover effect. We don’t see a green fill for the last button, because it contains no data, and we didn’t set a green fill for that option in the style.

To update a custom style, right-click the custom style on the ribbon and choose Modify. In this case, we need to change the font and fill settings for Hovered Selected Item with No Data. With that done, we see a green hover effect on the last button.

To apply the custom style to another slicer, just select the slicer and click the style. Any changes you make to a custom style will automatically apply to all slicers using that style.

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AuthorMicrosoft Most Valuable Professional Award

Dave Bruns

Hi - I'm Dave Bruns, and I run Exceljet with my wife, Lisa. Our goal is to help you work faster in Excel. We create short videos, and clear examples of formulas, functions, pivot tables, conditional formatting, and charts.