The Filters drop zone works, but it hides the filter state inside a dropdown. You can't tell at a glance what's currently filtered. A slicer fixes that. It's a filter made visible and clickable, a floating panel of buttons with one button per distinct value of a field. The buttons filter the pivot the instant you click, and they show their own state (selected buttons are highlighted). A timeline is the date-specialised slicer, a horizontal band you drag to pick a date range, with a granularity switch for Days / Months / Quarters / Years.
How do you insert a slicer and link it to several pivots?
To insert them, click inside the pivot, then PivotTable Analyze ▸ Insert Slicer (or Insert ▸ Slicer, Alt, N, SF). Tick the fields you want as slicers and click OK. For dates, use PivotTable Analyze ▸ Insert Timeline (Insert ▸ Timeline, Alt, N, ST), which only offers fields that are real dates. In a slicer, click to select one value. To pick several, Ctrl+click, or use the multi-select toggle button at the top right of the slicer. Clear the filter with the funnel-with-x button (Alt+C while the slicer is selected). Style and column count are on the Slicer ▸ Buttons / Styles contextual tab.
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The power move is one slicer driving many pivots. A slicer isn't chained to the pivot you made it from. Right-click the slicer ▸ Report Connections (in older versions, PivotTable Connections) and tick every pivot it should control. Now a single click on "South" filters three pivots and two PivotCharts in perfect lockstep. That's the entire mechanism behind a one-page interactive dashboard.
There's one requirement you need to understand. Connected pivots must share the same pivot cache. So build them from the same Table/connection, or copy an existing pivot with Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V so the copy inherits the cache. Two pivots built independently from the same range may end up on different caches and refuse to share a slicer. That looks like a puzzle until you know caches are the unit of sharing. The dashboards lessons build a full dashboard on this pattern.
Example: a Product slicer on US revenue
To make it concrete, take the US dataset in Worked example 2. A slicer on Product lets a reader click Software and watch every connected view collapse to software only. The software revenue then totals $23,800 across the three quarters. Slicers turn a static report into something a non-analyst can interrogate.