Where to Find Slicer in Power BI?

Building an interactive report in Power BI hinges on letting your users filter the data themselves, and the slicer is the most intuitive way to do that. If you’re staring at the Power BI interface wondering where this key feature is hiding, you’re in the right place. This guide will show you precisely where to find slicers, how to add them to your report, and different ways you can use them to bring your dashboards to life.

What Exactly Is a Slicer in Power BI?

Think of a slicer as an on-canvas visual filter. While you can filter data using the built-in "Filters" pane, those filters are often hidden and less intuitive for the average report viewer. A slicer, on the other hand, sits directly on your report page, openly displaying categories, dates, or numbers that users can click to filter the other visuals on the page.

Imagine a sales dashboard for a company. A slicer could present a list of sales reps. When a manager clicks on "Jane Doe," all the other charts and graphs on the page - total sales, deals won, product performance - instantly update to show data only for Jane. Click on "John Smith," and everything shifts again. It turns a static report into a dynamic, explorable 'data app' that empowers users to find answers to their own questions.

Essentially, slicers allow you to package filter options in a user-friendly format, making your reports much more engaging and useful for your audience.

Where to Find the Slicer Button: A Step-by-Step Guide

Finding the slicer button is simple once you know which area of the Power BI interface to focus on. It lives within the Visualizations pane, which is the section that contains all the different chart and graph types you can build.

Here’s the exact process to locate and add one to your report:

1. Open the Report View: Start by making sure you've opened your Power BI Desktop file and are in the "Report" view. This is the main canvas where you build your report pages, identified by the icon that looks like a bar chart in the top left-hand panel.
2. Locate the Visualizations Pane: By default, this pane appears on the right side of your screen. It's a key workspace featuring a grid of small icons, each representing a different visual type (e.g., bar chart, line chart, pie chart, map).
3. Find the Slicer Icon: Scan the icons in the Visualizations pane. The slicer icon looks like a rectangle with a small filter funnel symbol in the top-right corner. It's typically located about midway down the list of default visuals, often near the "Table" and "Matrix" icons.
4. Click the Icon: Once you find the slicer icon, simply click it. This action will place a blank, unconfigured slicer visual onto your active report page.

That's it. The slicer object is now on your canvas, ready for you to add data to it.

How to Add and Configure Your First Slicer

Placing the slicer on your canvas is just the beginning. The real value comes from connecting it to your data and customizing its appearance and behavior.

Creating and Populating Your Slicer

Once you have the blank slicer placeholder on your report page, you need to tell it which data field to use for filtering. The process is simple and works just like building any other visual.

• Step 1: Select the Slicer: Click on the empty slicer visual you just added to your canvas to make it the active object. You'll see its border highlighted.
• Step 2: Add Your Data Field: In the "Visualizations" pane, right below the grid of visual icons, you'll see a section with "wells" or placeholders for data. For a slicer, there is a primary well named "Field."
• Step 3: Provide the Data: From your "Data" pane (the far-right panel listing your data tables), find the field you want to filter by. For a sales report, this could be "Region," "Product Category," or "Year." Click and drag that field from the Data pane and drop it directly into the "Field" well.

Instantly, your slicer will populate with the unique values from that data column, presenting them as a clickable list.

Exploring Slicer Types and Formatting

Power BI gives you plenty of control over how your slicer looks and functions. The default vertical list is effective, but sometimes other formats are better suited for your data or your report's design.

To change the slicer’s type and settings, select the slicer and click the paintbrush icon (Format your visual) in the Visualizations pane. From there, head to Slicer settings.

Slicer Type Conversions

• List (Vertical): This is the default setting for most text-based fields. It displays all options in a list that users can scroll through.
• Dropdown: If you're short on space, changing the type to "Dropdown" is an excellent choice. It collapses the options into a single dropdown menu, saving valuable canvas real estate.
• Tile (Buttons): In older versions of Power BI, this was "Horizontal," and it’s now a Tile under "Style". This turns your slicer items into clickable buttons laid out horizontally. It's great for slicing by just a few options, like "This Year" vs. "Last Year."
• Range Slider (Between, Before, After): When you use a numeric field (like price) or a date field, the slicer automatically defaults to a range slider. This lets users drag two ends of a bar to select a range, which is perfect for filtering a report to show sales occurring between January 1st and March 31st, for example.

Key Formatting Options

The "Format visual" tab lets you fine-tune almost everything:

• Slicer settings > Selection: Here, you can toggle Multi-select with CTRL on or off, and you can enable a Show "Select all" option to let users quickly select or deselect every item.
• Slicer header: You can edit the title of the slicer, change its font size, color, and background.
• Values: Customize the font, color, and size of the actual items within the slicer list.

Practical Examples of Slicers in Action

Here are a few common scenarios where slicers transform a report:

• E-commerce Sales Dashboard: A store owner wants to analyze performance. They could have a slicer for Product Category (Apparel, Electronics, Home Goods), another dropdown for Sales Channel (Online, In-Store), and a date slider for Order Date. With a few clicks, they could isolate all "Electronics" sales from the "Online" channel in the last quarter.
• Marketing Campaign Report: A marketing team dashboard might use slicers for Campaign Name, Ad Platform (Google Ads, Facebook Ads), and Device (Desktop, Mobile). This lets them instantly compare the ROI of different campaigns across platforms, a task that would otherwise require multiple separate reports.
• Financial Performance Review: A finance team could create a report with a slicer for Fiscal Quarter and another for Business Unit. This would allow an executive to easily drill down into the financial health of each department on a quarterly basis during a meeting, answering questions on the fly.

Common Slip-Ups When Using a Slicer

Slicers are powerful but can be misused. Here are a few things to watch out for:

1. Overloading with Options: Avoid using a field with too many unique values in a slicer. For instance, putting "Customer Name" or "Order ID" in a slicer will create an unmanageably long list. Slicers work best for categorical data with a reasonable number of options (e.g., regions, product types, years). For high-cardinality fields, the filter pane is often a better tool.
2. Ignoring Slicer Interactions: By default, a slicer on a page filters every single visual on that same page. Sometimes, you don't want this. For example, you might want a slicer to filter a sales detail table but not a high-level KPI card showing total company revenue. You can control this by selecting the slicer, going to the "Format" menu at the top, and clicking "Edit interactions" to decide which visuals respond to the slicer and which ones ignore it.
3. Choosing the Wrong Slicer Format: Always pick the format that makes the most sense. A long vertical list of dates is far less user-friendly than a compact date slider. Similarly, for a simple "Yes/No" or "Active/Inactive" field, tiles or a dropdown save space and look cleaner than a vertical list.

Final Thoughts

Finding and using the slicer in Power BI is a fundamental skill that unlocks a new level of interactivity in your reports. Located right within the Visualizations pane, this small icon allows you to transform static charts into a dynamic, filterable canvas that empowers your stakeholders to explore data and discover insights on their own. By mastering its setup and formatting, you are well on your way to building more professional and valuable dashboards.

The core goal of interactive BI is to shorten the time between question and answer. At Graphed, we're taking this concept even further. Instead of an analyst needing to manually arrange charts and configure slicers to answer potential questions, we enable anyone to simply ask their questions. By connecting your sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce directly to Graphed, you can use natural language - "show me our sales from Facebook ads last month" - to instantly generate the dashboards and answers you need, all updated in real time.