What are slicers ?
What are filters?
How are they different from each other?
What and When should be used?
Well lets see,
Slicers and filters are almost the same except for some small differences. And which should be used at which time totally depends.
- Slicers are displayed on the report canvas, so it provides a clear picture on what the data is all about and whether the data has been filtered or not and if so, what are the filters at a glance. Whereas filter selections need be expanded to be used as well as to see the filters used.
- Slicers are available in the report canvas consuming report space, where are filters are not. So if you have lot of visuals and have concerns on slicers consuming more space then go for filters.
- If the filters need to be used frequently for the reports then slicers are the best choice, unlike filters considering the ease of access.
- Filters can be set for:
Visual level
Page level
Report level
Suppose you need to set different level of filters for the visuals in a page, simply avoid filters for some visuals this can only be obtained by slicers.
For an example in the given below example I want the units sold by country visual to represent units sold across all the countries. So, this can be easily obtained by setting filter none in edit interactions.
Just click on the relevant slicer in the example the country and click on “Edit Interactions” (Visual Tools -> Format -> Edit Interactions) and click on the None icon for the chart which you do not want to be filtered.
Using filters visual level filters can be provided, where you need to set the filters for each and every visual individually.
- Filters provide a range of options as Top N, Bottom N, Less than, Greater than, Less than or equal, etc.
But Slicers only provide a limited number of filtering options.
- Sync Slicer option
Once you create the slicers on one page, of course you can copy and paste the slicers on to the other page. But what if you have a handful of pages in your report? And what if you have a considerable number of slicers as well. Well that’s where the Sync slicer option comes in handy, with some other features which adds some icing to the piece of cake.
With the Sync Slicer option, the slicers set in one report can be synced to the other pages of the report. So not only you can duplicate the slicers on to the selected reports with just couple of clicks, but also enables you to sync them for better user experience.
This can be done in 3 ways.
Method 1
First enable the option Sync Slicer under view.
Then click on the relevant slicer. Now in the Sync Slicer pane we can enable the sync of the slicers in the other reports as well.
In the example given above The country slicer is available in page 1,
is also available and visible in page 2 and page 4. (Note the checkbox under the eye symbol).
In page 3 the country slicer is not visible but the data is synced. So if the user has selected France in page 1 page 3 will also reflect the data related to France.
In Page 4 the Country slicer is available, but it is not synced with the Page 1 country slicer data. So the country selected in page 1 will not be passed to the country slicer in page 4.
So, on and so fort the slicer option provides a bit flexible operations when compared with filters.
Method 2
First enable the option Sync Slicer under view.
And under advance options give a name to the sync group and you can give the same name to any slicer, which uses the same column and those slicers will be synced.
Method 3
Of course, you can copy and paste as the traditional way. And then power bi will prompt a question asking if you want to sync the two slicers just as given below. Which you can change anytime you want.
So likewise slicers and filters have unique features as well as different types and different levels of limitations. What and where to be used is the totally the developers call.
So think wise and work wise.
Shamali's BI 