Power BI Desktop has been out for GA for over a week now and some of the pro’s out there have come up with some pretty cool tricks. For instance:
But if you’re looking for a way to spice up you report filtering with a little color, try using the Treemap, Column or Funnel chart as a Slicer for those fields that only contain a few unique values. At this point with Power BI, you don’t have any customization options for the Slicer visualization (although I’m sure that is coming down the pipe in a future release). This option won’t work terribly well if the field you would like to use as a slicer has more than a dozen or so unique members, but you can experiment with it and see what you can come up with. Here’s my custom slicers in action.
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To multi-select tiles in the custom slicer, just hold Cntrl as you click.
This little trick relies on the natural cross filtering between data regions in the Power BI dashboards. First I created a measure that calculates the distinct count of the field that I wish to use as my slicer. In this case the field is Genre.
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Then I added a Treemap/Funnel chart to the report using the field Genre as the Group value and the measure Distinct Count Genre as the Values.
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Then just resize the visualization so that the squares are about evenly sized. There’s a few ways you can arrange it, but just play around with it and see what you can come up with.
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If you are wondering how I made the column chart slicer, here’s a gif image that shows the steps I used. Enjoy!
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Feedback?
What do you think? Leave me a comment below and let me know. Or if you’ve got a neat Power BI trick you’d like to share, let me know, as well. I love to hear new ideas! Thanks for reading!
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