Two new options for the button slicer now fully emerged from preview

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Power BI Desktop updates for October 2025 Part three of a three-part series of blogs
October sees the release of button slicers from preview and a very welcome feature to set table column widths automatically. The small changes introduced in the October 2025 Power BI update Welcome new options for setting column widths automatically Two new options for the button slicer now fully emerged from preview (this blog)

Power BI Desktop updates for October 2025

Part three of a three-part series of blogs

October sees the release of button slicers from preview and a very welcome feature to set table column widths automatically.

The small changes introduced in the October 2025 Power BI update
Welcome new options for setting column widths automatically
Two new options for the button slicer now fully emerged from preview (this blog)

Posted by Andy Brown on 05 November 2025

In this blog

Auto-grid
Cross-highlighting

The button slicer is now part of Power BI proper:

A button slicer has a million and one formatting options, but I've covered these in a previous blog.

The button slicer also now has a couple of new features, which I've explained under separate headings below.

Auto-grid

For the above example, what would you like to happen if someone chooses a couple of regions in the slicer on the left?

If I choose the London and North West regions, how should the button slicer on the right react?

There are two options:

If you enable Autogrid the button slicer will override the number of grid rows (3 in this case) and grid columns (3 again here) if there aren't sufficient distinct values to display.

The best thing to do is to try the two options and see which you prefer. You can find the Autogrid formatting toggle here:

Toggle the autogrid feature on and off in the button slicer's Layout card.

Cross-highlighting

This is a simple concept to understand, although the implementation is a little weird.

In this example, if we select Aintree and Aldershot in the bottom table how should the top button slicer change?

You can use something called highlight labels to say that the button slicer should show the corresponding regions:

Button slider with 2 regions highlighted

The button slicer shows the two regions whose towns have been selected. The other regions aren't selectable, because they're not currently in the filter context, and are displayed just for information.

Note that to make the disabled buttons clearer I've changed their background colour and font transparency:

The default disabled colours make the buttons not chosen hard to make out.

All of this is sensible, but it's how to achieve it which is odd:

To achieve the effect above, drag a field (here the town name) onto the Highlight label of the button slicer's field well.

This seems to make no sense. Why do I have to display an additional label just to get this feature to work? Surely this should just be some sort of tick box in the slicer's settings?

Parts of this blog
The small changes introduced in the October 2025 Power BI update Welcome new options for setting column widths automatically Two new options for the button slicer now fully emerged from preview (this blog)

Some other pages relevant to these blogs include:

You can also book hourly online consultancy for your time zone with one of our 7 expert trainers!

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