Data Bear’s Monday Motivation Blog Post

Happy New year DataBear peeps!  Hope it’s a data filled year for all. Lets dig into different 3 ways with slicers in Power BI.

3 Ways with slicers in power bi

There are many to formatting options when it comes to slicers, today I’ll share some of these options with you, I will be dividing this post on 3 ways with Slicers in Power BI in 3 categories.

  1. Clever designs

  2. Filtering options

  3. The slicer pane

1. Clever design options

There is nothing wrong with the default slicer look, but just some small subtle changes makes it look much sleeker and professional.

Easy changes are stuff like, change the font of Slicer header.  Add a border and change the radius to anything bigger than 0.

Depending on the space you have, you’ll need to decide on a type of slicer meaning a list or drop down. In case of a date, perhaps slider. Also if you need a single select of multiple options allowed.  Of course you will have to stick to the theme of your report, meaning colours, light or dark theme etc.  Some more report design ideas here.

Slicer designs

2. Filtering options for Slicers in Power BI

In some instances you would want to remove an option on a slicer, to avoid the user from choosing it, perhaps the result is 0 or something to that effect.  You can do this by using the Filter pane.  To do this you open the Filter pane, then click on the slicer to see that slicer detail on the filter pane.

Slicer with filter pane

 

On the filter pane you remove the category you want from the slicer, see below I unclicked Bike Racks, and it subsequently disappeared from the slicer.   You can then click on the eye icon to hide this detail from the user. It is important to know that when you do this, it just removes the category from the slicer, it does not exclude the data for that category, should you have all categories chosen.

Slicer with filter pane after

Hierarchy in slicers is another way to use it, it can be a space saver, if categories and sub categories exist and make sense.  You just add both fields in the slicer, and it gives this lovely cascading effect.

Slicer Hierarchy

3. The slicer pane

There are many many posts out there that show you how to build really nice filter pane, so today I just wanted to make you aware of the option while I’m blogging about Slicer in Power BI.  A slicer pane is used mostly to save space on the canvas.  It’s a way to hide all slicers, and they appear with the click of a button.  They are built by cleverly using the bookmark option of Power BI.  Here is a great video to get you started with the slicer pane.  Visit Data Bears blog page for a other posts to guide you on you Power Bi journey.

Report with a button for Open Slicer Pane

Closed Slicer pane

Report with Slicer pane open

Open Slicer pane