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Visual Awesomeness Unlocked: The Timeline Slicer

Headshot of article author The Power BI Team

By Amir Netz, Technical Fellow

If your data contains dates you are going to love this. Which means all of you…

This week, I am thrilled to introduce the newest member of the custom visuals family – Timeline Slicer. This Slicer was the top request visual on our community’s User Voice. Ain’t it great to scratch this one off?!?

The Timeline slicer is a graphical date range selector used as a filtering component in Power BI. This makes filtering data by date dimension easy and fun.

How often do you have to filter your data for a date range or at higher level such as month or quarter? Every single time. Right? Filtering is pain when you have to click through large numbers of date values to select the range you want. Changing the filter granularity from months, the quarters and years on the fly is super tedious. Well, it used to be super tedious.

The Timeline slicer is going to make this experience a breeze. With this simple slider control for dates, all you need to do, is just click and drag to the range that you want. You can also switch to a Year, Quarter or Month view to select ranges even at a higher level than dates. 

Check out this video on how this new visual is going to change how you interact with your date fields in Power BI

To use, simply import the Timeline Slicer from the Visuals gallery to your Power BI report and use it with a date column and immerse yourself with this amazing experience now.

You can simply click on the slicer to select a single value or click the edge and drag it to the range that you want.

You can also change the background & selection color and number of other formatting options to control the look-n-feel. SHIFT+Click also works for selecting a range.

How cool is that?

As usual – a a huge thank-you from us in Redmond to all of you around the world. Your votes drives our design and schedule. Your feedback makes us better. Your excitement energize us to no end.

Now, go, try it out and have some fun with this cool new toy you asked for.