How to Add Clear All Slicers in Power BI

Building an interactive report in Power BI is all about empowering users to slice and dice data, but too many filters can quickly lead to a cluttered view and a lost train of thought. This article will walk you through how to add a simple, one-click "Clear All Slicers" button to your Power BI report, dramatically improving the user experience and making your dashboards feel more professional and intuitive.

Why a "Clear All Slicers" Button is a Game Changer

Imagine your user is exploring a sales dashboard. They've clicked on a region, selected three sales reps, filtered by two product categories, and are looking at a specific date range. Now, they want to start a completely new analysis. What do they do? Without a reset button, they have to manually unclick every single filter across every slicer - a tedious and error-prone process. They might miss one, skewing their next analysis without even realizing it.

A "Clear All" button solves this by:

• Boosting Usability: It provides an intuitive, one-click way to return the report to its default state.
• Saving Time: Users can reset their view in a single second instead of methodically undoing each selection.
• Preventing Errors: It ensures that no lingering filters are accidentally left active, leading to more accurate analysis.
• Enhancing Professionalism: It’s a small touch that makes your dashboard feel like a polished, user-friendly application rather than just a collection of charts.

The Simple Secret: Power BI Bookmarks

Power BI doesn't have a dedicated, out-of-the-box widget for "Clear All Slicers." But the solution is clever and surprisingly simple: we’re going to use Bookmarks. A bookmark in Power BI captures the exact state of a report page - including all filters, slicer selections, sort orders, and drill-down locations. By creating a bookmark when all slicers are cleared, we can then assign that "snapshot" to a button, effectively creating our own reset function.

Step-by-Step: How to Add a Clear All Slicers Button

Follow these steps to add this great feature to your reports. We'll start with a clean report page, create the bookmark, add a button, and link the two together.

Step 1: Set Your Report to a Default State

First, you need to decide what the "reset" state should look like. For most use cases, this means having no filters applied. Go to the report page where you want to add the button.

Carefully go through every single slicer on the page and clear its selections. For dropdown slicers, make sure it’s a "Select All" state. For date ranges, return them to their widest possible range. Your page should look exactly as you want it to when a user clicks the reset button. This is the crucial first step, as the bookmark will save this exact view.

Step 2: Open the Bookmarks Pane

Now that your report page is set, you need to open the Bookmarks pane to save this state. From the top ribbon in Power BI Desktop:

1. Click on the View tab.
2. In the Show panes section, check the box next to Bookmarks.

A "Bookmarks" pane will appear on the right side of your screen.

Step 3: Create and Configure Your Bookmark

With your report page still in its fully cleared state, click the Add button in the Bookmarks pane. A new bookmark, likely named "Bookmark 1", will appear.

It's important to be organized. Rename this bookmark to something that makes sense.

1. Click the ellipsis (...) next to the new bookmark.
2. Select Rename.
3. Name it something descriptive, like "Clear All Filters - Sales Page".

Next, let's configure its behavior. Click the ellipsis again and ensure the settings are correct for a filter reset:

• Data: Make sure this is checked. This is the most important setting, as it saves the state of slicers and filters.
• Display: Uncheck this. The Display setting saves things like the size and position of your visuals. When you just want to reset data, turning this off prevents the bookmark from accidentally resizing something you moved later.
• Current Page: Check this. This ensures the bookmark only affects the slicers on the page it was created for, not every page in your report.
• All visuals / Selected visuals: For a full page reset, stick with "All visuals." If you only wanted to reset a specific group of slicers, you would select only those visuals before creating the bookmark and choose "Selected visuals."

Step 4: Insert a Button or Image

Now that we've "saved" our cleared state, we need something for the user to click.

1. Navigate to the Insert tab on the Power BI ribbon.
2. Click the Buttons dropdown. You have several options here, but Blank is often the most flexible. Alternatively, you could choose an icon or use Image to import a custom reset graphic.

A new blank button will appear on your report canvas. Drag it to a convenient, visible location — typically in the top right corner of the report near the other filters.

Step 5: Assign the Bookmark to the Button Action

With the new button selected, the Format pane will open on the right. This is where you bring the button to life by linking it to our "Clear All Filters" bookmark.

1. In the Format pane, find and expand the Action section.
2. Toggle the Action to On.
3. In the Type dropdown menu, select Bookmark.
4. A new Bookmark dropdown will appear. Select the bookmark you created earlier (e.g., "Clear All Filters - Sales Page").

Step 6: Style The Button and Add a Tooltip

The functionality is now in place, but we need to make it user-friendly. Still in the Format pane for the button:

• Under Button Text, turn it on and type a clear label like 'Reset Filters' or 'Clear All'. Customize the font, color, and size to match your report's design.
• Under Action, add helpful text in the Tooltip field. Something like, "Click to clear all selected filters on this page." Now, when a user hovers over the button in the Power BI service, this helpful prompt will appear, removing any guesswork.

Test It Out!

Your "Clear All Slicers" button is now complete. To test it in Power BI Desktop, you need to hold the Ctrl key while clicking the button.

1. Click on several different options in your slicers to filter your data.
2. Hold Ctrl and click your newly created 'Reset Filters' button.

If you've set it up correctly, all your slicers will snap back to their default, cleared state. Once you publish the report to the Power BI Service, your users will be able to reset the report with a simple, single click — no Ctrl key needed.

Advanced Considerations

While the single-page method is perfect for most scenarios, here are a few things to keep in mind for more complex reports:

• Multiple Pages: Bookmarks are page-specific. If you want this functionality on five different report pages, you will need to repeat this process for each page. Create a cleared state, add a bookmark for that page, and link a button to it.
• Maintaining the Bookmark: If you add a new slicer to a page after creating your reset bookmark, the button won't reset it. To fix this, simply clear all slicers (including the new one), select the existing bookmark in your Bookmarks pane, and click the ellipsis (...) to choose Update. This will overwrite the saved state with the new, fully-cleared version.
• Sync Slicers limitations: If you use Power BI's "Sync slicers" feature to have one slicer control visuals across multiple pages, be aware that a bookmark only resets the page it's on. Clicking the reset button on Page 1 will clear the synced slicer there, but its old selection might still be active on Page 2 until you navigate to that page's reset button.

Final Thoughts

By using the creative power of bookmarks, you've added a critical user experience feature that significantly elevates the quality and usability of your Power BI reports. It's a small detail that streamlines analysis and empowers users to explore their data freely without the friction of manual resets.

While mastering details like this is part of building great reports, we believe getting insights from your data shouldn't always require learning the complexities of traditional BI tools. With Graphed, we connect directly to your marketing and sales platforms like Shopify, Google Analytics, and Salesforce, allowing you to build real-time dashboards just by describing what you need in plain English. Instead of configuring slicers and bookmarks, you can just ask, "Show me my sales this month by campaign," and watch the dashboard build itself in seconds.