Hidden gems! Slicer Pain Relief in Power BI! Power BI is full of them…Sometimes, you find them after thorough research, and sometimes they just appear out of nowhere.

This post won’t be long – it’s just an homage to Power BI and one of its handy features that will make your life easier in specific circumstances.

Just recently, I was working on a report that had a slicer with many distinct values. In order to illustrate the challenge, I will use (as usual) the sample Contoso database. Now, imagine that I want to check the total sales amount for the product called “Contoso Coffee Maker 5C E0900 Silver“:

You see what I was talking about? Do I need to scroll down all the way to my desired product? It would be so tedious work to do.

Hidden gem called – Search

Of course not! There is a nice, quick, and easy solution to this challenge! Once I click on three dots in the upper right corner of the slicer, the first option I see is Search. And, if I click on it…

I get a nice Search bar on top of the slicer’s drop down list! I can now enter the item I’m searching for, and Power BI will narrow down the list:

And, instead of scrolling down to find my desired product among 1000 others, I can now easily locate it between 4 of them:

Thanks for reading!

About the Author:

My name is Nikola Ilic and I make music from the data. I’m really passionate about everything related to data. I have multi-year experience working with various flavors of data, predominantly with Microsoft’s BI stack. Therefore, I will write in most cases about SQL Server, T-SQL, SSAS, SSIS, SSRS, Power BI, Azure, etc. But, since I’m really curious by nature and always trying to learn something new, I will also consider writing about other data-related tools and techniques.

Reference:

Ilic, N. (2021). Slicer pain relief in Power BI!. Available at: https://data-mozart.com/slicer-pain-relief-in-power-bi/ [Accessed: 4th March 2021].

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