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Visual Awesomeness Unlocked: The Chiclet Slicer

Headshot of article author The Power BI Team

by Amir Netz, Technical Fellow

This is the first entry in a series of articles discussing some awesome features of visuals, many that are not very obvious at first glance.

We’ll start our journey with a visual that was uploaded just today into the gallery: The Chiclet Slicer.

The Chiclet Slicer was inspired by the great slicer control found in Excel since 2010.  But while we started with functionality of the Excel Slicer, the Power BI team took some creative freedoms with it. The result: This new Chiclet Slicer is not just great, it’s freaking-awesome.

Once you watch the video, you too will realize that this fantastic new visualization is destined to become the new workhorse of Power BI:

(Yes – that’s me with the metallic voice)

If you read these lines then you must have skipped the video. Because every sensible Power BI user should at this point stop reading and rash to try the Chiclet Slicer on their own. Yes – it’s that cool.

But for those of you who have not watched the video, here are some spoilers of what you have missed:

Chiclet are a slicers made of buttons:

That can also be arranged horizontally for a very efficient real estate use:

Or arranged as a matrix for a super compact form:

Not only that – they also support cross highlighting!

And it just get better: They can even contain images!

Or by removing the frame and text you can just make them into a data driven gallery of images!

 

In short they are just un-flipping-believably cool. Now – go use them. Just go. Run.