For those coming from the Excel 2013 world, you’ll surely want to create filters using the Power BI Slicers.  After all, you know that Slicers and Timelines are two of the sexiest filters we have for controlling filter context in Power Pivot models.  In this post we’re going to explore the slicer visual, and how to get closer to what you’re used to in Excel.

The Goal

I’m going to fall back to my last project here, and have created a single visual on a blank report page.  You probably remember this one, it’s the map of where I’ve stayed so far this year:

What I’d like to do now is add my slicers and timelines.  I’d like a slicers for Country and Province.  Should be easy, no?  Err… no. 

The default Power BI Slicers

Now, Power BI Desktop has a Slicer visualization, as you can see here:

So what’s wrong with it?  I’ll build two to show you why I’m less than satisfied…  Here’s what I did:

• Created a Slicer visual
• Added the Country field
• Created another Slicer visual
• Added the Province field

Do these look like Excel slicers to you?  They look a lot more like check boxes to me, not slicers…

Now don’t get me wrong, Power BI Slicers certainly work, as you can see here where I’ve drilled in to USA:

So let’s look at the difference between the Power BI Slicers and the Excel slicers that my expectations are based upon:

• The Province field hides all irrelevant items by default, unlike Excel.  I could not find a configuration option to change this.
• The checkbox thing drives me crazy.  I hate checkboxes in my Windows files list, I don’t like them here, and again it is inconsistent with Excel.  I could not find a way to turn those off.
• Originally I wanted to show the provinces in a two column slicer, like I can in Excel.  I could not figure out how to make this happen either.
• Finally, I wanted to show the bubbles like an Excel slicer.  The closest I could get was the image below (WARNING! SUPER UGLY GRAPHIC AHEAD!)  Should you feel the need to create this abomination you need to select the slicer, go to the Formatting roller –> Items –> Outline –> Frame.

Gross.  That is just gross.  Honestly, I really don’t understand why the slicer is so different from Excel’s.  That slicer is pretty, and people are used to it.

Not happy with these, I deleted both slicers.

Is all hope lost for attractive Power BI Slicers?

Thankfully, the answer is no.  The Power BI team has given developers the ability to create and distribute their own visuals into the Power BI custom visuals gallery.  So let’s go and pull in a couple of those to fill this gap.

Locating the Custom Visuals Gallery

To be fair, the steps for this could be MUCH easier.  To get here the first time you can either just click this link or follow these steps:

• Click the ellipses in the Visualizations gallery to import a custom visualization

• Choose to Import a Custom Visual
• Click the Learn More link

• To be fair, you should probably read the page you’re taken to, as it talks about all the risks of using a custom visual.  (Remember not all custom visuals are provided by Microsoft, many are provided by 3rd parties.)
• I scrolled straight to the bottom and clicked the link in the See Also section to go to the Power BI custom visuals gallery

You’ll be taken to the gallery, which has a lot of pretty visuals that can be imported into your project.

To make it easier to find custom visuals, I’d recommend you do a couple of things here:

1. Bookmark this page (making it a bit easier to get back to it.)
2. Choose to sort the gallery by Name rather than by Most Recent (which is the default)

When you click on a visual it will offer to download a pbiviz file that you can store in a folder.  You’ll want to remember the location, as you’ll need to import the visuals into every new PBI file you create.

I downloaded a specific visual here: the Chiclet Slicer which, ironically, is published by Microsoft.

Importing the Chiclet Slicer

When I returned to Power BI desktop, it’s still sitting at the Import Custom Visual dialog, which is convenient.  So I was able to just click the big yellow Import button, and select the ChicletSlicer file.  Doing so adds a new option to the Visualizations gallery:

I created two new Chiclet slicers, one for Country and one for Province, and was pleased to end up with the following:

Now that’s more like it!  Certainly needs some tweaking, but better than the past iteration.  So let’s get to that tweaking…  I changed the formatting options for each of the slicers as follows:

• The Country slicer
  • General –> Columns –> 1
  • Header –> Off
  • Chiclets
    • Unselected Color = very light grey

  • Title –> On
    • Text = Country, Font Color = Black, Alignment = Center, Text Size = 10
• The Province slicer
  • General –> Columns –> 2
  • Header –> Off
  • Chiclets
    • Unselected Color = very light grey
  • Title –> On
    • Text = Country, Font Color = Black, Alignment = Center, Text Size = 10

And, as you can see, the results are pretty good:

A couple of things that I couldn’t figure out here though:

• I wanted to align the text in my “chiclets” to the left, like in Excel.  Can’t seem to find an option for that.
• There is a tantalizing option in the “General” section to show disabled items “Inplace”, and an option in the chiclets to set the colour for those items.  I would have expected it to be equivalent to Excel’s “Show Disabled”, but it doesn’t seem to do that.  I have not figured out how to replicate that effect.

Final Thoughts

To be fair, there are a ton of configuration options for the Chiclet slicer, much more than I’m going to cover.  Why this slicer isn’t part of Power BI’s default install is beyond me… especially since it’s published by Microsoft.