Excel for Mac: Modifying Slicer styles

This week in our series about Microsoft Excel for Mac, we focus on a problem with the dialog for modifying a Slicer style.

If you use Excel for Mac, and you want to customize the style of a Slicer, it may seem like you can do that.  Unfortunately, we found a problem, and it doesn't seem like you can actually modify a Slicer style, even though the menu indicates that you can.

How to modify a Slicer style

Before you can modify a Slicer style, you first need to duplicate one of the existing styles.  Just follow these steps:

• Insert a Slicer.  You can do this by selecting a cell in a Table or PivotTable.  Then go to Insert > Slicer, or 'PivotTable Analyze' > Insert Slicer.

• Right-click on one of the built-in Slicer styles and choose Duplicate.

• This will open the dialog in which you can type a name for the new Slicer style.  In the example below, I called my new style "MyCustom SlicerStyle 1". 

• At this point, you can click OK, and it will create the new style with the name that you gave it.  However, it's just a duplicate of the built-in style that you selected, so you'll wan to modify some of the style elements to make it different than the built-in style.

• Unfortunately, it appears that other than the Name field, the rest of the dialog is incorrect.  The title and the lables in the dialog indicate that it's for editing Table styles, rather than Slicer styles. If you've ever modified a table style, you'll recognize it.  Below, we've highlighted the parts of the dialog that refer to tables.  None of these items relate to Slicers, so we can only assume that it's a bug.  (We've reported this problem to Microsoft, so maybe by the time you read this, it will have been fixed.)

TIP

If you have a strong need to modify the Slicer style, you'll need to use a Windows computer to do so.  Once you set the style options, they'll work correctly on a Mac, you just can't set or modify the options on a Mac until Microsoft fixes things up.

We hope you found this topic helpful. Check back for more details about Excel for Mac and how it’s different to Excel for Windows.