How to Build and Format Slicer Visuals in Power BI

Build sleek slicer visuals in Power BI Desktop

In this video, you will learn all about building and formatting slicers in Power BI. Matt will teach you what slicers are, why they are important, and how to use them to filter, navigate and structure your data.

Hi. This is Matt with Playfair+. In today’s video, we’re going to talk slicers. Slicers are one of the most powerful features in PBI and it’s one of the great ways to help you format, showcase, and basically structure all your data on screen. So they’re used as filters, they’re used as navigation. Slicers are incredibly powerful and I’m excited to dive in with you on this tutorial. Let’s take a look.

We’ll go ahead and make this a whole slicer page. So go ahead and retitle this Slicer. And what we want to do is showcase how to build and format our slicers and what they do to the visualization. So before we get started, let’s go ahead and put a table on, and we’re going to go ahead and bring in a bunch of information into this table.

So we’ll bring in. What Country we’re looking at, we’re going to bring in, let’s look at Category, we’ll bring in probably let’s do what Profit we’re doing things like that. Just information that we want to make sure we’re showing on the screen. And then let’s see how our slicers will affect our table.

So we’ve got our pre-built table, and then we’re going to go and bring in our slicer. So we’ll select a slicer. And we can pull information that’s already here, on the screen, or we can actually even slice it further if we want to do it. So if we want to slice by date or month, it will also act as a filter on this table.

So let’s start with one that we know we have on here and we’ve got Category. So that’s my go-to field. It’s nice, it’s four pieces, good information. So we want to slice by Category, so we drop it on. And by selecting our slicer, we’re able to filter our data onscreen. So when we say slicer, what we’re really just meaning is onscreen filter.

It allows us to slice that data the way we want to look at it. So, control click is how we do multiple selections. And if you’ve control clicked to all of them, that is the same as having none selected as well. There are slicer options for different types of information. So if I wanted to do a slicer that was done on my date hierarchy and I wanted to bring in the Year field, you can see it automatically comes in as a range selector.

You can see the information change, the numbers change based on our range that we’ve selected, um, and then we can change that under Slicer settings. Right now the default for a date range would be Between, it wants to look at that range. But you can do a vertical list. You can create Tile slicers to have, oh, let’s select a single year.

So you can look at it this way. It kind of creates a visual menu if you want. Um, you can also do just a straight Dropdown. This is really good if you want to put your slicers hidden somewhere and then have them revealed through a dashboard action. I like the dropdown a lot because it doesn’t take up a ton of space.

You can put a lot of slicers together, uh, in a really close environment. And then Less than or equal to, Greater than equal to, the same as that range. So you’re looking at essentially a single pole of the range. So like Between, obviously we have both options to filter from. Greater than or equal to, or Less than or equal to, just has the single direction you can move your range.

Again, that’s just a quick view of the slicers. Dan, if you had more questions about slicers put them in the chat and we’ll try to get to them at the end and be really specific about what you’d like to see from our slicer demo. It’s also something that I recommend you go in and just play around with, see what you can do with a slicer.

I really, I think that they’re great. They’re so powerful. They are something that we could use in a visual perspective. This has been Matt with Playfair+. Thanks for watching.