Slicers

Slicer visuals represent a central element of self-service functionality in Power BI in addition to the Visual interactions behavior described in the previous section. The standard slicer visual displays the unique values of a single column enabling report users to apply their own filter selections. Additionally, Power BI Desktop provides several formatting and filter condition options available based on the data type of the column. The following image contains three sample slicer visuals with each slicer representing a different data type (text, number, date):

Slicer visuals

In this example, the three slicers filter for two sales territory countries (Australia and France), a range of product list prices ($500 to $2,500), and the last 30 days inclusive of the current date (11/15/2017 to 12/14/2017). Filter condition rules are available for numeric and date columns in slicers, such as greater than or equal to $500 and after 5/1/2017, respectively.

The numeric range slicer, such as the preceding $500 to $2,500 example, is a preview feature as of the November 2017 release for Power BI Desktop. In its current state, the numeric range slicer is exclusive to Power BI Desktop and will appear as a standard list slicer in the Power BI service. Additionally, only numeric columns can be used for the numeric range slicers - DAX measures are not supported.

See the Report filter conditions and Relative date filtering sections later in this chapter for additional details on relative date filters.

By default, the Single Select option under the Selection Controls formatting card is enabled and the Show "Select All... option is disabled. These settings require users to hold down the Ctrl key to select multiple items. For slicer visuals with many unique values, and when users regularly need to exclude only one or a few items, enabling the Show "Select All... option can improve usability. Additionally, for slicers based on text data-type columns, users can search for values via the ellipsis in the top-right corner of the visual.

To preserve space on the report canvas, the slicer visual supports a drop-down option for all column data types. In the following example, a single value is selected for the country and date slicers but multiple values are selected for the price slicer:

Slicer visuals as dropdown

The drop-down option is most applicable for columns with many unique values. Slicers are generally appropriate to empower users with self-service capabilities such that they're not limited to filter conditions defined outside the report canvas.

It's recommended to group slicer visuals together near the edge of a report page. Slicers are most commonly aligned on the left side of the page below the visuals in the top-left corner. If vertical canvas space is limited, slicers displayed in list format can be presented horizontally rather than vertically. The orientation formatting property (vertical or horizontal) is available under the General formatting card.

Unlike other visuals (for example, charts, maps, tables), visual-level filters cannot be applied to slicer visuals. Report and page-level filters are required to reduce the available values displayed on a slicer visual. Additional information on these filter scopes and associated filter conditions supported are included in the Report filter scopes section later in this chapter.

One of the most powerful features of slicers is the ability to filter both the current report page and optionally other report pages from a single slicer visual. The details of utilizing this feature, referred to as Slicer synchronization, are included in the following section.

Table of Contents for Slicers

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Table of Contents for
Slicers