Power BI Blog: Managing Slicers

Welcome back to this week’s edition of the Power BI blog series. This week, Jonathan Liau looks at how to manage slicers in a multi-paged report.

Let’s take a look at my fictious report that currently has five pages:

In this example, we currently have slicers on all these pages, but we do not know which ones are currently synchronised and which ones are not. Clearly, the best way to find out is to manually go through each page, change a slicer and track if other slicers in other pages have responded to these adjustments… is what I would say in an alternative universe where the ‘Sync slicers’ option does not exist.

The easier way to manage slicers in a report is through the ‘Sync slicers’ pane. To toggle options in the ‘Sync slicers’ pane, we first click on the slicer that we want to manage (for this example I will select the Timeline slicer), navigate to the View tab on the Ribbon, then click on the ‘Sync slicers’ option.

This will bring up a new pane on the right side of the report called, you’ve guessed it, ‘Sync slicers’:

It displays a simple table of all the pages in your report combined with two additional columns, Sync and Visible:

• the Sync column determines if the slicer that is currently selected will be synchronised with the other slicers of the same field in other pages
• the Visible column, identified by the eye symbol, determines if the selected slicer will be visible in other pages.

You should note that a slicer must be visible in a page before it can be synchronised, obviously…

Toggling the Visible option on or off will determine if a copy of the selected slicer will appear on the respective pages. For example, we can easily remove the Timeline slicer (the slicer we have selected earlier):

from pages 4 and 5, viz.

If we navigate to page 4, we will no longer see the Timeline slicer:

We can also add slicers to other pages this way, removing the need to copy and paste a slicer. However, please note that this method does not preserve formatting from the original slicer. Therefore, we would recommend use this panel to manage if the slicers would synchronise across the pages.

We can synchronise slicers by ticking the Sync option in the panel. If we only want the Timeline slicer to be synchronised across pages 1 and 4, this can be done easily with the panel.

After ticking the Sync option in pages 1 and 4, the Timeline slicers on both those pages will be synchronised.

That’s it for this week! Join us next week for more on Power BI.

In the meantime, please remember we offer training in Power BI which you can find out more about here. If you wish to catch up on past articles, you can find all of our past Power BI blogs here.