New features in the February 2018 update of Power BI Desktop
Part four of a nine-part series of blogs

You can now search for formatting properties, have slicers which work across pages and create quick measures, among other new features.

  1. Power BI Desktop - February 2018 update new features
  2. Search for a formatting property
  3. Quick Measures
  4. Synchronising slicers across report pages (this blog)
  5. Multi-select data points in a chart
  6. Overflow data labels
  7. Marking date tables as such
  8. Extra DAX functions
  9. Features still in preview as of February 2018

For a cumulative list of all of the updates to Power BI Desktop in the last few year or two, see this blog.  Our two-day Power BI Desktop course always uses the latest version of the software.

Posted by Andy Brown on 15 February 2018

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Synchronising slicers across report pages

This nifty feature actually performs two separate functions: it allows you to repeat a slicer on different report pages, and it lets a slicer filter different pages.

We at Wise Owl are pretty sure there's a bug in this feature (if you create and then remove a slicer, its effects seem to linger sometimes).

Getting slicers to appear on multiple pages

Firstly, you can get a slicer to appear on every page:

A slicer

You can select the slicer on the left, and get it to appear on any other pages of your choice.

Of course, you need to have left room for it!

Slicer on top of chart

On this page we should have moved the chart to one side, to make room for the perma-slicer.

This is a slight over-simplification of what happens, as if in our example the second page already had a slicer by the RegionName field, this would appear instead.

Synchronising slicers across pages

Secondly, you can get the choices you make in a slicer to apply to other pages in your report:

Page one choices

This is page one of your report, and we've chosen to view data for the West Midlands region.

The slicer choice applies also to the second report page:

Page two of report

This is page two, and it's only showing sales for towns in the West Midlands region, even though the page doesn't contain any filters or slicers.

The above sentence isn't technically quite true.  The second page does contain a copy of the slicer from the first page, but it's just not been made visible.

How to create synchronised slicers

Having seen what they do, here's how to create synchronised slicers.  First, choose to display the relevant pane:

View sync slicers

In the View tab of the ribbon, tick the Sync slicers box.

Next, select the slicer whose settings you want to change:

Selecting a slicer

Here we're going to change the sync settings for the region name slicer.

 

Choose how you want this slicer to work on other pages:

Slicer sync settings

This slicer (on page 1) will also be visible on page 3 (that's what the right-hand column means). Any choice that you make within the slicer will also apply to page 2 (that's what the left-hand column means).

 

In practice you would probably tick either both columns or neither column for any given page: having an invisible slicer which controls what you see (or a visible one which doesn't) is likely to confuse everyone! 

  1. Power BI Desktop - February 2018 update new features
  2. Search for a formatting property
  3. Quick Measures
  4. Synchronising slicers across report pages (this blog)
  5. Multi-select data points in a chart
  6. Overflow data labels
  7. Marking date tables as such
  8. Extra DAX functions
  9. Features still in preview as of February 2018
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