- Yooo! Adam Saxton with Guy in a Cube and in this video, we are gonna look at the difference between
slicers and the filter pane. And is there a difference? Let's do this. (upbeat music) If you're finding us for the first time be sure to hit that subscribe button to stay up to date with all the videos from both Patrick and myself. Right, slicers versus the filter
pane what's the difference? Both actually have the impact of filtering data in your report, right? So sometimes you wanna
see it for a certain year or you wanna see it
for a certain category. And both of those allow you to do that. As the saying goes, the
devil's in the details. And that's what I wanna
get into a little bit here just so you're better equipped to make the right
decision in your reports. All right, the father's talking, let's head over to my machine and see what this is all about. All right, so I've got a few
visuals on the report canvas. One thing to note with
regards to filtering data just remember that each
visual can filter each other. So if I say, I want to look at accessories only I can click on accessories and you'll see that it does
impact other visuals around me. So that's one way of filtering your data but there are other ways
that people can interact with the data to get the
answers that they want. So let's say that I wanted to
look at this for a given year. So what I can do is I
can take my year column drag that over here and I'm gonna choose the
slicer visual, that's right. The slicer is a visual and
it's important to remember that each visual on the canvas will issue one or more
queries to the storage engine. Now, if you're doing everything in import usually this is okay, usually. But if you're doing DirectQuery this could have drastic effect on the amount of queries going
back to your data source. So just be mindful of that that from a slicer
perspective, it is a visual. So by default, it's going
to be the slider option. And you can look at that, right? We can slide it, we can do different things
from a year perspective. One thing that I see a lot of people doing is just choosing a list visual. So here we can just select the year that we want to slice on and that's cool. Just a pro tip from a
performance perspective, one thing I would recommend is defaulting to a dropdown slicer. The thing about dropdown slicers is that when you're actually using this when you go to load that report page it's actually not gonna
send a query for the slicer if it's a dropdown. So it won't actually send the query until you select the drop down
to go get the list of items. So it's almost like
you're deferring the query at that point, which
is just a good practice and it can help reduce the
load of the report itself. So you can see here when I go to actually choose the dropdown like actually select
it to get me the list, that's when the actual query would be run for that given slicer. Another interesting thing
from a slicer perspective that filters don't necessarily have is each visual we can actually
control the interactions of other visuals. If I go to format, edit
interactions, I could say, look I only want this to
filter the total sales amount. So now let's turn that off. And now when we do years we'll see that it is not
affecting the other visuals it is only affecting the
total sales amount, right? So we can be selective in how we actually use slicers to do that. There's another aspect to slicers as well called sync slicers. But I wanna come back to that once we look at the filters, 'cause that's gonna come into play from the filter pane perspective. So let's take a look at the filter pane. Right, so the filter pane
itself, it's over here you can expand and collapse it and you can add things to this. So one thing we can see is we
can see filters on this page and then we could see
filters on all pages. I can even go a step further
and if I select a visual then we'll actually see
filters on the visual. So I've got the visual itself I've got the entire page,
which is this entire canvas then I have all pages,
so that's pretty cool. So if I do year, I could say I want year on this whole page I could change that to basic filtering and I can have that same
effect that the slicer has. So it's the same exact type of filtering that I can do there. One thing you'll note is that from the filter pane perspective I don't have that edit interaction so I can't necessarily say this is only for this
visual or this visual. That's where the filters
on this visual section come into play, it's a
little bit more manual work 'cause you actually have
to go and set all that up. Filters also have this
advanced filtering option which allows you to do some or conditions and some more complex filtering conditions than what a slicer
necessarily allows you to do to be aware of that. From a performance perspective
another thing I recommend when you go to save the report have the filter pane
collapsed, not expanded. So I talked about with the
slicers the dropdown box that can allow you to defer the queries. The same thing is true if
the filter pane is collapsed. So if that filter pane is collapsed and it's not gonna go issue the queries for the filter dropdown
items that are part of it. So that's another way you
can defer performance. All right, I said I would
come back to sync slicers. So think about this section
the filters on all pages. Now the thing with filter on all pages is that filter is gonna be
applied to the entire reports. Slicers by default don't
allow you to do that but sync slicers potentially
can allow you to do that. So from a sync slicer perspective what I can do is go to view and then I can actually
choose sync slicers. Now, what this allows me
to do is I can say page one that's where I'm seeing it. And then I can say this slicer
is available on other pages. And you'll see that it's there because I have another slicer
with the year dropdown. And so that's why it's
showing up on others. But you can say that it's
also affecting it's syncing between these pages. So my year slicer on my
page one is not syncing with the other year
slicers on the other pages. So if I wanted to control
additional overview as well as my overview slicer panel page, I could say, yep I want
this to be synced as well. So now anytime I make a change here it's going to change those other pages. So this is a way you can get
that filter on all pages. The other beautiful thing about this is you'll also see that on
this additional overview page I'm not showing the slicer,
it's affecting the page but it's not actually
visible on that page. So that's another way that you can get some cool interactions
with your reports and using slicers instead of filters. Or you could have a similar effect on the filters on all pages. So the difference here is that while filter pane does
have filter on all pages it doesn't allow you to do
selective filtering on pages. Whereas sync slicers does
give you that benefit but there's a little bit more management that you have to do with it
in order to get it set up. So there's some give
and takes on both sides. All right, so that's the
basics of slicers and filters. One thing I wanna do just to
get your ideas revving here you could go a step further and have what I refer
to as a slicer panel. And so this is a way
that you can actually use the combination of bookmarks,
selections and buttons to actually get more app like experiences. So one thing you'll see here is if I click on my little hamburger icon I have a bookmark setup where
it will actually go through and do these things. You also notice 2016 was highlighted that was because of my sync slicer. And so if I uncheck that
now all years are present and I can close the slicer panel and now I can interact with these. The benefits of a slicer panel is that it actually allows you to defer the loading of
those visuals as well. So you'll notice I had a
list slicer that's there and I said, drop-down
allows you to defer it but if the visual's not visible then it's going to defer that as well. So having the slicer
panel hidden by default, that means that those visuals aren't gonna actually
execute on page load. So that has the same kinda
benefit as the dropdown slicer. I've got a link in the description below to a video I did a while back
on creating a slicer panel. So go check that out if you're
interested in how I did it. One more thing I wanna talk to you about with regards to DirectQuery and this is the concept
of query reduction. So when you go into options of your report come down to query reduction and this allows you to change
some things by default. So I mentioned that you
can do edit interactions for the slicers. The first option there is that you can disable cross highlighting and filtering by default so
it reverses the paradigm. So nothing interacts with each other and then you can selectively turn that on. But slicers and filters both
have an additional item here. So for slicers, I could say add an applied
button to each slicer to apply those changes. So by default, when I
change a slicer selection it's automatically gonna execute queries on the relevant visuals. If you wanna do like a multi-select you can make those changes and then hit apply to
then execute the query. So that way you're not adding
all these additional queries to the storage engine,
especially if it's DirectQuery. Now for example, let me go and hit okay and if we go in and expand this now one thing you'll see here
is I can do multiple years and then hit apply and then
it will go to the given item. So it's not gonna actually
execute those items until I hit apply. Now a drawback here if we go back to query reduction settings the difference the
filter pane actually has that you can have a single apply button to the entire filter
pane whereas the slicers is it's gonna be on
each individual slicer. So that's an option that
you've gotta think about in terms of how you wanna
work with that report, especially if you're doing DirectQuery and how you wanna manage that for the actual user interaction. There may be some education
required for you users to understand what's
available in that report if you're going down that road. And that was just a quick
look at slicers versus filters hopefully you'll learn something new. If you did let me know
in the comments below I'd love to hear it. If you like this video be sure to hit that big thumbs up button smash it if you so desire. If it's your first time here
hit that subscribe button and as always for both Patrick and myself, thanks for watching keep being awesome and we'll see you in the next video.
