Visuals Level Slicers for A Slicer in #PowerBI

In my current project, one of the user requirement was to have a filter on the Year Slicer. To explain in detail, we have various measures to show metrics for current and earlier measures. For example 2016,2017 and 2018. In 2016, we always have blank values for Last Year metrics, having empty values don’t tell the story well. So to tell the story, we need to pull three years worth of data but display only two years in the Slicer. The easiest way to handle this situation would have had a visual level filter on the Year slicer.

Power BI Slicers doesn’t support Visual Slicers. However, with the help of Selection Pane and Sync slicers, I did a quick workaround. I created another slicer for Year attribute, let’s call it Slicer-0. Updated the Visual Interactions of the original slicer (let’s call it Slicer-1) to not to filter the Slicer-0. As I have Synced Slicers on all pages, so I synced Slicer-0 on all pages. And I made sure; I updated the Visual Interactions on all Pages. Then hidden the Slicer-0 on all pages

Things to remember:

A hidden slicer means hidden logic in the Model. Whenever I design Power BI Models, I try to keep up a page with Designer Notes by specifying things like this. Basically, things which are helpful during troubleshooting. So if you are using hidden slicers, make sure you note it somewhere.

Another thing to note is, under Filters and Slicers affecting this Visual will show extra slicer information in the Pop-Up. If you want you can disable the Filter Icon under Visual Headers. But I prefer having the Filter option enabled.

Prathy 🙂