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eniX
Helper III
Helper III

Slicer vs Filters-Section

Hi folks,

 

what is actually the difference between slicer and the filters (Filters section on the right side)? When should I use slicer and when a filter? So far I have always used slicers, but they start to take too much space on the canvas..

 

slicer_vs_filter.png

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION
WolfBiber
Employee
Employee

Hey,

 If you have an active Connection between 2 Visuals (select Slicer --> Format-->Edit Interactions) 

and filter i.e. a table, you can see that the slicer puts an "Visual Level Filter" to that target visual.

 

So a Filter is a Filter with different scopes,

A Slicer: Visualisation of a Filter.Unbenannt.png

 

Its mainly used to provide an easier and more convenient way to the end user to filter the visuals.

I use them to provide the end user an intuitive way to filter the "Main" Categories, i.e. Customer Types or similar.

 

Greetings

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6 REPLIES 6
Jessemodbi
New Member

Jessemodbi
New Member

WolfBiber
Employee
Employee

Hey,

 If you have an active Connection between 2 Visuals (select Slicer --> Format-->Edit Interactions) 

and filter i.e. a table, you can see that the slicer puts an "Visual Level Filter" to that target visual.

 

So a Filter is a Filter with different scopes,

A Slicer: Visualisation of a Filter.Unbenannt.png

 

Its mainly used to provide an easier and more convenient way to the end user to filter the visuals.

I use them to provide the end user an intuitive way to filter the "Main" Categories, i.e. Customer Types or similar.

 

Greetings

A great article from DataVeld considering slicers in light of Power BI's new Filter Pane experience:

https://dataveld.com/2019/01/18/are-power-bi-slicers-still-relevant-with-the-new-filter-pane/

I enjoyed slicers for quite some time and created fancy selective interactions with other visuals and fancy selective synchronizations across the report pages. However, this made the reports more difficult to consume for the end users, since they can't easily see what's going on behind the curtain. So with the arrival of the new filter pane I decided to abandon slicers from my reports. This might seem less user-friendly on first sight. But since my customers are getting more and more used to the PowerBI UI anyway, it's a huge gain in report transparency.

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