Change date slider slicer to checkbox slicer

[joglidden]

Power BI, in all it's infinite wisdom, keeps deciding for me that I need a date-slider slicer, when what I actually want is checkbox slicer. Really appreciate PBI figuring out what I want for me, but it would also be nice to be able to switch a date slider back to a checkbox slicer. I've tried everything I can think of, and I can't find how to switch it. Anyone know how to do this? 

The field I'm trying to slice on is 'Year'. Yeah, I'm sure PBI is hard-coded to do what it thinks is best for me on that name. 

[joglidden2]

Posting this here for my own documentation: 
There doesn't appear to be a way to change a slicer on numeric values of any type to a "slider" slicer. Here is one of the "ideas" that could use more votes to get this fixed. 
Microsoft Idea  · Numeric Range Slicer (powerbi.com)

[joglidden2]

Here I am back at my own post looking for the same solution because MSPBI hasn't gotten around to fixing this quirky issue with slicers... 

Tip: If you can't get the date slicer/slider to change to a list, then try adding another non-date field, it should convert to a list, and then you can delete the date and the slicer will remain a list. 

[OwenAuger · Accepted solution]

@joglidden

Agree the default behaviours can be bothersome at times.

I assume you are working with a general date column, not necessarily from a calendar table, with the built-in date hierarchy being generated behind the scenes?

This process works for me:

1. Create slicer and drag Date column into Field well. This creates the date-slider by default:
2. Click the drop-down next to Date in the Field well and click Date Hierarchy
   

   By default only Year is shown from the Date Hierarchy (which is what you want). 

3. This causes the Slicer to change to a Year-slider:

4.  Click the drop-down in the top right of the Slicer and choose List & click the ellipsis then Sort By Year to fix the sort order:

[joglidden]

@OwenAuger, thanks for the excellent reply. What confuses me is that the field 'Year' is clearly (I've checked) an integer or 'Number' field. That's why I think it's doing this based on the name. When I do the same for 'Month', I get my checkboxes.

I'll try your suggestion, and if it works, I'll mark it as the solution. 

[OwenAuger]

@joglidden

You're welcome. Actually my reply assumed you were working with a Date column with an auto-generated date hierarchy including a Year column.

If you have an explicit Year column, then leave out step 2 - basically you just change the slicer to a List.

Hope it works for you in any case 🙂

[MattAllington]

i have seen this too and I think it is a bug. You can report it here https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Issues/idb-p/Issues