Since the desired timelines are solely available for Pivot Tables, the work-around unavoidably needs to use one.įirst, a helper Pivot Table is inserted, including a timeline to filter the Pivot Table by. Neither Pivot Tables, nor Pivot Charts included. the dashboard consists only of cell ranges and standard Excel charts. You see the timeline at top left to filter the views by date?Īnd yes, all calculations and charts shown on this dashboard are still based on the Excel table containing the raw data, i.e. It is less user-friendly, less intuitive, requires more real estate than a timeline and the slicer may show a huge number of entries, if the data range covers several years. This does the job, at least somehow, but let’s call a spade a spade: this is not really a viable option. One clumsy work-around would be to insert a standard slicer on an aggregated date column like : However, the data visualized on the dashboard above does also have a date dimension () and the users of the dashboard would certainly appreciate, if not even require, to be able to filter the views by date, too. The post Filter Excel Dashboards with Table Slicers provided the following dashboard using slicers on a table as the interactive filter controls:Īs mentioned in the introduction, timelines are not available for Excel Tables. If you want to take advantage of Excel’s incredible flexibility, table based dashboards have the egde over Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts in my humble opinion.

Using a table and additional calculations in cell ranges, however, give you full control of how your dashboard shall look like. However, if you want to have full control over the design and the functionality of your dashboard, Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts come with a few limitations, like the available chart types or the risk of users interacting with the Pivot Table and messing up the display by changing its layout, and others. There is nothing wrong with building a dashboard using Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts only. You may wonder, why it should be worth the hassle to use Slicers and Timelines on tables for an Excel dashboard, if you could simply use Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts instead. Why using Slicers and Timelines on Tables in the first place?

Excel slicer templates