Power BI Blog: Text Slicer Improvements

Welcome back to this week’s edition of the Power BI blog series.  This week, we look how a Text slicer may now accept multiple values.

Following the November 2024 Text slicer release, this update enhances functionality and user experience by allowing multiple text selections.  This Text slicer is currently in Preview.  To enable the Text slicer, go to Options and settings -> Options -> Preview features -> Text slicer visual to make sure it is selected, and then simply restart Power BI.

This month’s enhancement adds a new Slicer settings control with an on / off toggle allowing the slicer to ‘Accept multiple values’.  All other existing formatting options for the Input text, ‘Apply’ button and ‘Input’ text box from the November update remain the same in the Format pane.

After creating a Text slicer visual and adding a text field from the data model, users may filter the dataset based on user input.  Simply click the slicer input box, type your text and apply the filter either by clicking the apply icon, pressing ENTER or else clicking outside the visual.  The slicer immediately filters and displays the results, and you can repeat these steps to add more text selections.

When the ‘Accept multiple values option’ is enabled, additional text may be added to the slicer by repeating these steps, thereby allowing multiple selections for filtering the dataset.  Keep in mind that switching the toggle on or off will clear any previous text selections.

Adding filtering with multiple values brings more control to data slicing.  Future enhancements are still planned as Power BI is modified to improve its visualisation capabilities with the Text slicer. 

In the meantime, please remember we offer training in Power BI which you can find out more about here.  If you wish to catch up on past articles, you can find all of our past Power BI blogs here.