Expandable slicer panels in Power BI: how to keep a clear filter context?

Slicer panels?

Very recently, Power BI guru Adam Saxton published a great video on how to make slicer panels in Power BI. If you have no idea what a slicer panel is, please check out the video below. Basically, you make use of bookmarks to show or hide a set of filters. This way you can preserve that precious design space on your report while still allowing users to use the slicer functionalities in a user friendly way.

Myself, I have implemented slicer panels for almost a year now: ever since the bookmarks became generally available, this potential was evident to me. There are even occasions when nested filter panels are useful, which could be expanded from a first panel.

What about the filter context?

Placing your slicers in a home-made selection pane has the exact same effect as placing a slicer on your report in the 'normal way'. It does not matter if the slicers on the slicer panel are hidden or shown. For all measures and visuals on your report page, the behavior will be exactly the same as if you placed the slicer on your report in the normal way.

So what is the problem?

The problem with putting all or part of your slicers in a slicer panel is that although Power BI filter context is not affected, the user might loose the sense of that filter context. When I just started implementing slicer panels, in many occasions I have had users coming to me: 'My sales is too low!' or 'I am missing opportunities!'. This was not caused by missing data but only caused by the fact that a filter was applied and the user forgot about it. The user forgot about it, because the filters were by default hidden in the background when the slicer panel was collapsed. To me, this is bad design. This is especially likely to happen when 'preserve filters' is enabled or when people are using the long-awaited new personalized bookmarking functionality.

Show the filter context when not showing filters

To prevent users misinterpreting the reports because of a mistake in assumed filter context, I now always include a 'filter overview' on reports that use filter panes. With 'filter overview' a visual is meant that shows the user if filters are applied and/or what filters are applied. This way, users will always have the filter context shown to them when the slicer panel is hidden. Note that this is not only useful in live view but also especially when making screenshots or other exports that might otherwise loose the sense of filter context.

To make a filter overview, I prefer using the Text Wrapper visual from MAQ which can be found in the market place and is free to use. Make a 'filtercontext' measure and show it using this visual as it is much more flexible than the standard card visual. The DAX formula for the measure of course depends highly on your own wishes and some examples are shown below. A concrete visual example how this could be implemented in the report of Adam as shown in his video can be seen in below image, based on a print screen from his video.

Conclusion

In my opinion, creating slicer panels is an excellent method to structure the visuals on your report. However I also think that every developer that creates slicer panels should also take the time to create a filter overview that is presented to the user on every page. This prevents mistakes in interpretation and contributes to the clearness and correctness of the designed reports

What do you think?

Example DAX measures for different purposes

If you only want the user to be informed that the report is filtered when filtering the slicer on Business unit and / or Region a DAX formula as below suffices. The visual will show Attention: this report is filtered as soon as you set a filter.

If you also want to inform the user which filters are applied, you could do something like shown below. When applying a filter to Business Unit and Region slicer the visual will show: Filtered on: BU, REGION but show only BU or REGION when filtering on only one of them.

You can even go a step further by showing what filters criteria are applied. In the below example, it shows the criteria itself if only one item is selected, or 'multiple' when more than one item (but not all) is selected. Also note that in the DAX below newlines are used as well as [ and ] to separate filters.