Power BI is loaded with tons of tools and features. Power BI slicer is an essential tool for visualizing elements in Power BI reports. In this post, I will give you a walkthrough of Power BI slicers, the hottest topic: Power BI Sync slicers, creating and formatting them, and other essential concepts.
Let’s have a look at the topics of discussion for this blog:
- Power BI Slicers
- What is the need for Power BI Slicers?
- How to create Slicers in Power BI?
- Power BI Sync Slicers
- Date Slicer
- Numeric Range Slicer
- Formatting the Slicers
- Drawbacks of Power BI Slicers
- FAQs
- Conclusion
Power BI Slicers
Power BI Slicers are canvas visual filters. This feature lets users sorts and applies filters to a packed report to display the information they want. Slicers act as a visual on reports where users can select values while analyzing the reports. For example, if there is a report of the past ten years’ results, users can create slicers for every year. Now this slicer will let users select a specific year to view the result report. Once the user selects a particular year, data and values related to that year will reflect in the report.
What is the need for Power BI?
Following are the things when you need to use Power BI Slicers.
- Whenever you want to view a focused report, you can place slicers next to necessary graphs and charts.
- If you want to use report canvas to access important and frequently used filters, you can make your job easy with slicers.
- Slicers can let you view currently applied filters very easily. Therefore you do not need to see the filter drop-down list.
- If you want to display rarely used columns, hidden columns, etc., to users for analysis, you can blindly go for slicers.
These were few scenarios where you can frequently use Power BI slicers.
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How to create Slicers in Power BI?
There are straightforward steps to create Power BI slicers. Let’s create slicers with these steps given below:
Step 1) Go to Power BI Desktop App. Create any sample report on power BI or open an existing report. Now go to the Visualization pane, click on Slicer. You will notice that an empty slicer template is appearing on the screen.
Step 2) Go to the Fields section, drag and drop a field of your choice to the Values column (Below Visualization Tab)
Step 3) You can see on this image given below that we have added a field Card Type. This means a Slicer is created.
Step 4) Customize this slicer by your own choice. You can increase and decrease its size on the screen by adjusting it from corners.
Also Check: MSBI vs Power bi, to know the major differences between them.
Now we will see Sync Slicers in Power BI.
Power BI Sync Slicers
Power BI Sync Slicers is an essential feature of Slicers. Let’s say a user created a slicer for only one page on a report. This feature allows this user to sync the newly created slicer for all other pages of the report.
Now we will see how to enable the Sync slicer option.
Step 1) Go to View Tab.
Step 2) Click on the Sync Slicers option as shown in the image.
Step 3) The Sync Slicer pane will open up. This contains the name of the total number of pages present in the report. There are two options for checking. If you check on the refresh icon column, this will sync the effects of the selections made in a slicer on that page only. If you check on the eye icon, it will make the slicer visible for other pages.
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Date Slicer
Let’s see how a date slicer is created. Whenever users add a date field as a slicer value, a date slicer is created. The date slicer consists of a sliding bar having two buttons at each end. These buttons help in deciding the range. Users can slide these buttons backward and forward to adjust the value. It sets the date from oldest to latest by default.
Step 1) To get a calendar view of the data, click on a particular Date.
Step 2) To change the type of date slicer, click on the drop-down menu. According to the requirement of the users, they can select Between, Before, After, list, Dropdown, relative date, relative time from the dropdown list.
Step 3) You can take the reference from this snapshot attached below. This is the snap of dropdown dates.
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Now we will discuss the Numeric Range Slicer.
Numeric Range Slicer
Whenever you drop a numeric field in the Data field section, a Numeric range slicer is generated.
Numeric range slicer displays the range from lower range to maximum range. Users can increase or decrease the range of numeric values by sliding the buttons backward and forward. If you apply any filter on the numeric range, changes will reflect on your report that contains a graphical representation of data.
Let’s discuss the Formatting Slicer.
Formatting the Slicers
There are many options available in Power BI to make your slicers look visually great. Let’s explore the formatting options one by one.
Step 1) To open formatting options, click on the Paint roller Format icon. There are many formatting options available such as Selection control, slicer header, Items, Title, Background, Border, etc. Every tab contains further options to format a particular slicer.
Step 2) The image posted below is the simple formatting of slicers for your reference.
Step 3) The first tab is the General tab. You can use this tab to set the orientation of the slicer in horizontal and vertical form.
Step 4) This is the horizontal slicer orientation present in the image given below.
Step 5) The next tab is the Selection tab, which lets you select the type of item in the slicer. There are three options available to select the slicer items.
- Single select
- Multi-select
- Select all
Step 6) The Slicer Head tab lets you customize the font and background color of the slicer. There are many other options available, such as text size, font type, and outline type.
Step 7) The next tab is the Items tab, which lets you set the background color, font color, type of outline, font type, text size of individual slicer item. It makes your slicers look attractive.
Check out: How to Transform data in Power BI
Drawbacks of Power BI Slicers
Guys, there are many benefits of Power BI Slicers. But there are some places where it lags. Let’s have a look at the drawbacks of Power BI Slicers.
- Power BI does not provide support for input fields.
- There is no support for drill down in the Power BI report.
- There is no provision of pinning a slicer to a dashboard.
- You cannot use visual-level filters in Slicers of Power BI.
- Power BI slicers do not support measures.
- The numeric range slicer is valid only for Power BI Desktop. You cannot use it for the Power BI service.
- Whenever you import any data model in Power BI and use the same data model in Slicers, do not provide time zone information.
- The numeric range slicer only filters the data on a row level. It doesn’t work with aggregate values.
FAQs
Q1. What is a slicer in Power BI?
Ans: Power BI slicers are canvas visual filters. Slicers help users to sort and filter a packed report and let them view the information they want.
Q2. What is the difference between a filter and a slicer in Power BI?
Ans: Slicer is a canvas visual filter, whereas a filter is one of the hidden and static features that can refine the entire report.
Q3. What are the advantages of filtering using slicers overusing filtering?
Ans: Slicers can control multiple PivotTables. For instance, you can have various PivotTable reports that work on the same data source. If you apply a filter to all reports, it will consume time. Instead, you can use a single slicer for the entire process.
Conclusion
There are many advantages of using slicers. Power BI sync slicers really provide great functionality by syncing one slicer to all pages of a report. Users can also format the slicers. There are many functionalities of slicers discussed above that users can make use of. Users are free to create slicers for their reports and step up the level of analysis.
References
- Introduction to Microsoft Power BI Platform | Everything You Must Know
- Exam PL-300: Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst | A Replacement Of DA-100
- Microsoft Certified Data Analyst Associate [PL-300] Step By Step Activity Guides (Hands-On Labs)
- Case Study: Display Live Data Streaming Using Power BI Service
- Introduction to Data Modeling in Power BI
- What is Power Query | Microsoft Azure Power BI Tool
- Top 15 Differences Between SSRS vs Power BI
- How to Become a Power BI Developer?
Next Steps to begin with PL-300 Certification:
In our PL-300 Certification Training Program, we’ll cover 10+ Hands-On Labs. If you wish to start your journey towards becoming a Microsoft Certified: Power BI Data Analyst Associate, try our FREE CLASS.
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