no matter how you slice it

Regardless of how a situation is analyzed, viewed, or portrayed, the truth of it remains unchanged. No matter how you slice it, the drastically lower sales numbers this year are bad news for the company's prospects for growth.

Fig. no matter what your perspective is; no matter how you try to portray something. No matter how you slice it, the results of the meeting present all sorts of problems for the office staff.

Regardless of how one views something, as in No matter how you slice it, he's still guilty of perjury. This expression uses slice in the sense of "cut apart." [Colloquial; first half of 1900s]

In addition to the subsequent idiom beginning with slice, also see greatest thing since sliced bread; no matter how you slice it.

To share the profits. This metaphor has largely replaced the early-twentieth-century slice of the melon, but exists side by side with the more literal piece of the action. It comes from nineteenth-century America. T. N. Page used a version in Red Rock (1898): “Does he want to keep all the pie for himself?” And the Boston Sunday Herald (1967): “An appellate court victory . . . cut Weymouth’s total property valuation . . . to give the town a bigger slice of the sales tax pie.” A related term, no matter how you slice it, is a twentieth-century Americanism meaning “no matter how you look at it.” Carl Sandburg used it in The People, Yes (1936): “No matter how thick or how thin you slice it it’s still baloney.”