We previously talked about using toggles/bookmarks in our blog Hidden Treasures in Power BI: A Baker’s Dozen (#13). The toggle solution is ideal when end-users prefer to keep everything on one page, save on real estate by reducing the clutter, and want the slicers to apply across all related toggled-to visuals.
With Sync Slicers, however, we can quickly attain a similar result and provide more detail if desired, across multiple pages assuming two key points:
1.) Users are not averse to moving through multiple pages in Power BI, and
2.) It is desired that any slicer selection should automatically apply to all visuals
using the same slicer among all other pages.
How do we do it?
In Power BI, select your slicer and then, from the top of the screen, select View. Then from the Show Panes ribbon, Sync Slicers:
We can see that the slicer is on both the first page, “Yearly Trend” and on the second page, “Products”, and is set to Visible. If it were not visible yet on the other pages, that may be selected here as well – under the visible/eyeball icon.
Again, the Sync Slicers option is used when we have multiple pages in Power BI. By default, when a slicer is changed in one page of visuals, it is not changed on any of the other pages. That very well may be the desired effect. So, we use Sync Slicers when we want ALL pages to be updated regardless of which page we change the slicer selection.
The Sync option is to the right of “Page name” and looks like a recycle/rotation icon. Select the pages where the Slicer will sync. In this case we only have two pages and we will select both:
Now when we select our slicer values on one page, whether it be the 1st or 2nd page in this example, it carries through to the other pages using this slicer:
Page 1.
Page 2.
Reciprocally, if the slicer is changed on Page 2, the “sync” will automatically update Page 1 as well. This feature also works when using multiple slicers and we can even go a step further using Advanced Options to create groups to sync slicers using different fields.
Let us know if you’d like to learn more about syncing multiple filters or syncing Grouped slicers. We’ll be happy to help!
- Joe Wolf is an ERP Functional Analyst and Business Intelligence Solution Consultant with Main Street Apps.