Button, list and text slicers

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Power BI Desktop updates for September 2025 Part four of a four-part series of blogs
The big changes in this month's update are two preview features which will change the working lives of DAX authors when released: a new way of creating calendars and the ability to write functions in DAX. A summary of the September 2025 Power BI updates The enhanced DAX time intelligence calendar features in Power BI Writing DAX functions Button, list and text slicers (this blog)

Power BI Desktop updates for September 2025

Part four of a four-part series of blogs

The big changes in this month's update are two preview features which will change the working lives of DAX authors when released: a new way of creating calendars and the ability to write functions in DAX.

A summary of the September 2025 Power BI updates
The enhanced DAX time intelligence calendar features in Power BI
Writing DAX functions
Button, list and text slicers (this blog)

Posted by Andy Brown on 25 September 2025

In this blog

List slicers
Text slicers

When is a change not a change? Button, text and list slicers are still in preview, but they have been silently turned on:

At some stage in September these options suddenly became ticked by default.

We've blogged previously on button slicers (way back towards the end of 2023 when they were first announced), but have included a quick summary of list and text slicers below for completeness.

These are the visuals which are now suddenly turned on by default.

List slicers

A traditional slicer allows you to display boxes next to each selectable option:

A standard slicer.

A list slicer does the same, but with a lot of extra (and in this owl's opinion, unnecessary) formatting options:

The selected item Bird has total sales of 2279, and I'm currently hovering over Mammal (whose background and font size has dynamically changed).

The main formatting settings that you can change are as follows:

You can control what the labels look like separately when they're selected, when you hover over them or at all times (All).

To give one more idea of the lengths you can go to, here I've snipped the button shape for the selected item only!

Look carefully at Bird (selected) and you'll see its button looks different.

Does the world need this level of control over such a minor feature?

Text slicers

A text slicer is a great way of allowing a user to type free format text into a search box:

This text slicer (based on the TownName field) is waiting for a user to type in part of a town name.

Text slicers work like this:

Here a user has typed in ai, so the report is showing only those towns containing this text.

You can format the following parts of a text slicer:

You can format the input text box (1) separately according to whether a user is typing into it or not, the dismiss button (2) and the apply button (3).

As for a list slicer, a text slicer doesn't add anything functionally to Power BI Desktop - you've always been able to type text into a normal slicer - but it does add a zillion extra formatting options!

Parts of this blog
A summary of the September 2025 Power BI updates The enhanced DAX time intelligence calendar features in Power BI Writing DAX functions Button, list and text slicers (this blog)