POWER BI: Slicers

The Basics: Slicing your data

Basics of Slicers:

A slicer is a visualization tool that filters and segments data. It allows you to filter by specific dimensions (i.e by product type or city) or by a set criteria (ex. large transactions).

When you select an item in the slicer, only that item will be shown and the rest of the data gets filtered out. For instance take your entire sales data. You can set up slicers to look at sales by product, region, date or a particular customer demographic.

How to make a slicer:

To make a slicer select the slicer visual in Power BI under Visualizations. Next choose the column in your data set that you want to filter. You can also create a custom column know as a calculated column.

Power BI demo:

Below is an example of how slicers can bring your report to life

  • Illustrates the different types and styles of slicers
  • Dropdown slicer hides categories until selected
  • Date Slicer lets you scroll or pick a specific date
  • Revenue by Day of Week graph uses tooltip feature and stroke weight
Additional Comments:

This example is a static report. However automating a report like this is easy. If your data is connected to a database where data gets updated daily or in real-time you can write a SQL query that always gets the last full week of data. If your data is still in excel files, you can also update the data in excel without having to recreate reports. Another variation is comparing this week vs last week in an automated report.

Slicer Properties:

List Style Properties
List Default: Lists all values in your slicer. If you have many values it will take up lots of space or user will have to scroll.
Dropdown Option: Takes up a small amount of space, category values not shown.
Selection Control Properties
Select All Default: Turned off by default.
Single Select Default: Turned on by default. Allows user to select only one category in slicer at a time. (unless you hold down ctrl key)


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