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How to Make Slicer Buttons in Power BI

Cody Schneider••7 min read

Standard Power BI slicers get the job done, but let's be honest - they often lack visual appeal. Transforming those default lists or dropdowns into clean, clickable buttons can instantly make your report feel more like a modern web application and less like a static spreadsheet. This guide will walk you through exactly how to create, style, and master slicer buttons in Power BI to give your users a more intuitive and visually engaging experience.

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What Are Slicer Buttons in Power BI?

Slicer buttons are simply a specific formatting style applied to the standard Slicer visual. Instead of presenting filtering options in a vertical list that takes up valuable screen real estate, this style arranges them as horizontal or tiled buttons. Think of them as a way to upgrade your user interface without needing any complex code or custom visuals.

The benefits go beyond just looks:

  • Improved User Experience (UX): Buttons are instantly recognizable and invite clicks, making your reports more intuitive for users who may not be familiar with BI tools.
  • Space Efficiency: A horizontal row of buttons often uses less vertical space than a long list, freeing up room for more important data visualizations.
  • Modern Design: Button styles give your dashboard a clean, professional aesthetic that aligns with modern design principles.

Creating Your First Slicer: The Foundation

Before you can have slicer buttons, you need a slicer. If you already have one on your report canvas, feel free to skip to the next section. If not, here's how to add one in seconds.

For this example, let’s assume you have a sales dataset with a column for "Product Category."

  1. Select the Slicer Visual: In the Visualizations pane on the right, click the Slicer icon (it looks like a funnel with a filter). An empty slicer container will appear on your report canvas.
  2. Add Your Data: With the slicer selected, go to your Data pane. Find the field you want to use for filtering - in our case, "Product Category" - and drag it into the Field well in the Visualizations pane.

You should now see a basic vertical list slicer with your categories (e.g., "Electronics," "Apparel," "Home Goods"). It’s functional, but now it's time to make it look great.

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Turning a Default Slicer into Buttons

This is where the magic happens. Converting that simple list into a button layout requires just one key setting change.

With your slicer visual selected:

  1. Navigate to the Format visual pane (the paintbrush icon).
  2. Expand the Slicer settings section.
  3. Click on Options.
  4. Underneath Style, you will likely see "Vertical list" selected. Change this to Tile.

Instantly, your list will transform into a responsive grid of buttons. You can now resize the slicer container on your canvas. Dragging it to be wider will arrange the buttons in a single horizontal row, while making it more square will stack them in a grid. This single change is the core of creating slicer buttons.

Styling Your Slicer Buttons for a Custom Look

Creating the buttons is the first step, styling them is what will truly elevate your report's design. The Format visual pane gives you granular control over almost every aspect of your buttons' appearance.

Customizing Button-Level Appearance

Most of the cosmetic changes happen in the Values section of the Format visual pane. Inside, you can control the text font, size, color, and most importantly, the background. The real power here is styling based on state:

  • Default State: How the buttons look when nothing is selected or hovered over. You can set the Color (for the font) and Background here.
  • On Hover: Set a different background color to give users visual feedback when their cursor moves over a button.
  • On Press: Customize the look for the moment a button is clicked.
  • Selected: This is the most important one. Give selected buttons a distinct background color (like a bold brand color) and font color (e.g., white text on a dark background) so users can clearly see which filters are active.

You can also adjust the Border color, width, and round the corners using the Border radius slider to create softer, pill-shaped buttons.

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Controlling Slicer Functionality

Go back to the Slicer settings > Selection section to define how users can interact with your buttons.

  • Single select: If this is turned on, users can only choose one button at a time. This is perfect for when you want to force a choice between mutually exclusive options, like "Monthly" vs. "Quarterly" views.
  • Multi-select with CTRL: This is the default. It allows users to select multiple buttons by holding the CTRL key, which offers flexibility but isn't always intuitive for new users.
  • Show "Select all" option: Enabling this adds a handy "Select all" button to your group, which is a great user-friendly feature.

Adding a Clear Selections Button

A "Clear" button is a must-have for usability. It's not part of the slicer visual itself but a separate element that you link to it.

  1. Go to the Insert tab in the main Power BI ribbon.
  2. Click Buttons and choose either a Blank button for full customization or the pre-styled reset button.
  3. Position the button near your slicers.
  4. Select the button, and in the Format pane that appears, turn on the Action toggle.
  5. Expand the Action settings. For Type, select Clear all slicers.

Now, users have an obvious, one-click way to reset filters to the default view, significantly improving the report's ease of use.

Advanced Slicer Button Techniques

Once you've mastered the basics, you can start employing more advanced slicer strategies to make your reports even more dynamic.

Using Chiclet Slicers for Image Buttons

What if you want to filter by product image or a company logo instead of text? For that, you’ll need a custom visual from AppSource called the Chiclet Slicer.

  1. In the Visualizations pane, click the three dots (...) and select Get more visuals.
  2. Search for "Chiclet Slicer" and add it to Power BI.
  3. Now, select the Chiclet Slicer from your Visualizations pane. In your data model, you’ll need a column containing publicly accessible URLs for your images.
  4. Drag the text category field into the Category well and the image URL field into the Image well.

You'll now have a slicer made of clickable images - a powerful way to enhance C-commerce dashboards or any report where visual identifiers are important.

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Syncing Slicers Across Multiple Pages

By default, a slicer only affects the page it's on. But what if you have a multi-page report and want a filter selected on page one to carry over to pages two and three? That's what the Sync slicers feature is for.

  1. Go to the View tab in the Power BI ribbon and check the box for Sync slicers. A new pane will appear.
  2. Select your original slicer on the first page.
  3. In the Sync slicers pane, you'll see a list of all your report pages. For each page you want the filter to apply to, check the checkbox in the "sync" column (the icon with two arrows).
  4. The visible column (the eye icon) controls whether the slicer itself appears on that page. This lets you have a "hidden" slicer on a page that is still being filtered by a selection made elsewhere.

This powerful feature creates a seamless experience, allowing users to make a selection once and explore its impact across the entire report without having to re-apply filters on every page.

Final Thoughts

Shifting from default lists to styled slicer buttons is a simple yet high-impact way to improve the design and usability of your Power BI reports. By taking a few extra minutes to customize aspects like object states, selection controls, and syncing behavior, you deliver a professional and intuitive analytics experience that keeps your users engaged.

While mastering these kinds of customizations is a valuable skill, it also highlights the time and expertise required just to visualize data effectively in traditional tools. At Graphed we created a tool that lets you skip the tedious formatting altogether. By simply describing the dashboard you need in plain English - like "create a sales report with buttons to filter by product category" - our AI creates a fully interactive, real-time dashboard instantly. It’s a powerful way to get straight to insights without spending hours inside a complex BI tool.

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