Format or Remove Borders from a Slicer or Timeline in Excel

Changing the formatting, or removing completely, the borders from Excel Slicers and Timelines isn’t obvious – read on to find out how

One of my favourite features introduced with Excel 2010 was the ability to use Slicers against Pivot Tables & Pivot Charts.

With Excel 2013, Microsoft expanded upon this by allowing them to be connected to Tables of data, and also introduced Timeline Slicers.

These nifty slicers are basically a time-based slicer, but presents it as an expandable timeline.

I’ll do a separate write up on timeline slicers at some point in the near future, but one thing I noticed is that unlike other objects in Excel, such as Charts, it’s not immediately obvious how you format or remove borders and other elements of the slicers.

Formatting for these objects is controlled by ‘Styles’. When you select the Slicer or Timeline, you’ll get the ‘Slicer Tools’ or ‘Timeline Tools’ tab appear, and you’ll see a choice of Slicer Styles to pick from. The available styles give you some flexibility over basic colour schemes, so it can fit in with the data you’re presenting.

However, you may find there’s nothing there that quite suits what you’re after – and you certainly won’t find one which gets rid of the borders – but you can create your own style, and define this yourself – and it’s far simpler that you might think.

Start by finding a Style which closely meets your needs colour wise. I’ve gone for Timeline Style Light 1.

It so happens I want to remove some of the ‘furniture’ from the Timeline for a cleaner look. These can be turned off from the OPTIONS tab, SHOW group (This differs for Slicers).

Not to get rid of that border.

Back in the Styles group, right-click on the Style you’ve selected, and select ‘Duplicate’

From here, you can modify all visual formatting of the slicer / timeline. The exact options will differ between Slicers & Timelines, but it’s the same layout and approach.

Give your modified Style a name. Then select the ‘Whole Timeline’ option, and ‘Format’.

Head to the ‘Border’ tab, and select the ‘None’ option – or change them to whatever style / colour you wish.

Select OK to close the Format window, and OK again to close the Modify Style window.

Now back in the OPTIONS tab, expand the list of Styles, and you should see your new style listed under a new heading ‘Custom’.

Select it, and it should then apply the style to your Timeline/Slicer

And there you have it – a borderless Slicer / Timeline for your data presentation.

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