I recently designed a Power BI report for one of my clients that displays ‘Product Sales and Discounts‘. The report utilizes various types of visualizations for showing discounts and profits accumulated for each product.
However, he wants to filter product discounts by each product across different countries.
Instead of using the Filter pane, you can add a Slicer visual to the Power BI report, which will filter all visualizations on the Power BI report page.
This tutorial will cover how to use slicers in Power BI. Below are the topics related to Power BI Slicers:
- What is a Slicer in Power BI
- How to add a Slicer in Power BI
- Types of Slicers in Power BI
What are Slicers in Power BI?
In Power BI, Slicers are one type of visualization that can be used to filter or separate the data by slicing the data that needs to be displayed on the Power BI report page.
When to use:
- Slicers are used when you want to display commonly used or essential information on the report canvas for easy access.
- Filter by columns that are not needed.
Check out Add and Customize a Dropdown Slicer in Power BI
Add a Slicer in the Power BI Report
Now, let me guide you through the step-by-step process of adding a Slicer visual to your Power BI report.
I have created a Power BI report using ‘Products Sales Data in Different Countries‘ with different types of visualization in that report, displaying the Product’s discount, profit, and gross sale by country, and Sales price and Manufacturing price of products.
You can see the Power BI report I have created below:
Let’s see how to add a Slicer to a Power BI report:
- Open the Power BI report canvas, and connect your data source. Then, select the “Get data” option and choose the data source you want to connect to. In my case, I have connected with the sample data.
Create the Power BI report according to your requirements using the connected data source.
- Next, navigate to the Power BI report. Under the Visualizations pane, select the ‘Build visual’ section and click ‘Slicer‘.
- Then, drag and drop the desired field from the Data pane into the Field option of the slicer window.
- Now, you can see the slicer visual has been added to the Power BI report.
Watch the GIF below to see how the slicer filters data based on the country value across all visualizations.
This is how to add a Slicer visualization in Power BI.
Types of Slicers in Power BI
Now, let’s discuss the different types of slicers available in Power BI.
If you are working with the current version or the latest version of Power BI, you can see three types of slicers that are displayed under the Visualizations pane.
- Button Slicer
- List Slicer
- Text Slicer
Type 1:- Button Slicer in Power BI
It is a new type of slicer in Power BI that helps users to filter data in reports and dashboards. It differs from other kinds of slicers, which display slicers in the form of buttons and a grid layout.
Power BI button slicers can be arranged in rows and columns.
The button slicer can integrate images into buttons, as well as conditional formatting for labels, visually enhancing their appeal.
With this type of slicer, users can choose to filter options as clickable buttons, rather than checkboxes or drop-downs.
You can add this slicer to a Power BI report from the ‘Build Visual‘ section of the Visualizations pane.
The image below shows a Button slicer in a Power BI report, where you can select combined filtering options. Suppose I have chosen three products [Paseo, Velo, and VTT]. The report will be filtered on these three products.
Type 2:- List Slicer in Power BI
It is another type of slicer that allows filtering the data present on a report or a visual by selecting one or more values from a vertically arranged list.
The screenshot below shows the ‘List Slicer‘ with the Product field in a Power BI report.
By default, it displays the radio button options in a vertical list format, allowing users to select and filter data by a single option.
To select multiple filtering options, you need to turn off the single-select option, which displays all values in a vertical list with checkboxes.
Type 3:- Text Slicer in Power BI
Text slicers provide a search bar that enables users to locate the desired value and filter data based on the searched text.
This type of slicer provides a flexible filtering experience. Unlike button slicers and list slicers, text slicers allow users to define their filter criteria.
The image below shows the Text slicer with the Product field on a Power BI report:
You can filter the report by searching with the text in the search box. Here, I have to filter the report by the product ‘Amarilla‘. The below Power BI report will be displayed.
Suppose I search for ‘A‘ in the search box; then it will display the report with Products that contain the letter ‘A‘ in them. Refer to the image below:
It also supports multiple select options, which allows filtering by multiple values at once.
This way, you can add different types of slicers to your Power BI report.
Through this tutorial, you may get an idea about Power BI slicers, how they can add to your Power BI report, and different types of slicers in Power BI. Users can easily filter the data with the help of a slicer without using the filters pane window. Do let me know if this Power BI article is interesting & helpful.
You may like the following Power BI slicers tutorials:
- Power BI Slicer Panel
- Power BI slicer checkbox
- Power BI Slicer: Multiple Selections
- Set Default Value in Power BI Slicer
After working for more than 18 years in Microsoft technologies like SharePoint, Microsoft 365, and Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI), I thought will share my SharePoint expertise knowledge with the world. Our audiences are from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, etc. For my expertise knowledge and SharePoint tutorials, Microsoft has been awarded a Microsoft SharePoint MVP (12 times). I have also worked in companies like HP, TCS, KPIT, etc.
