A really cool feature from Power BI - The "Apply All Slicers" & "Clear All Slicers"

Thinking why is it so cool? Let's find out...

Consider a Power BI report which is having multi select slicers. When a user selects a value, it runs a query & renders the visual. Each time a value is selected this process repeats -- increasing the number of queries. This definitely has an impact on user experience as well as performance when there are a greater number of values to be selected. Currently we have the option to add an 'Apply' button to each slicer. With this feature the report authors can allow their report consumers to apply many filter modifications at once. By this, the consumer spends less time waiting to see the impact on the report visuals. 

Now imagine a situation where we have multiple slicers. Although we could reduce the number of queries from a single slicer (as we saw in previous section), now there will be as many numbers of queries as that of slicers in the report. So how can we reduce the number of queries further? 

We can now achieve it using these new "Apply All Slicers" & "Clear All Slicers" buttons. These buttons have the capability to keep a track of the slicer selections & apply / cancel them together when a user clicks.

For example, suppose we have 6 slicers in a report, with the addition of 'Apply all slicers' Power BI executes the filtering of values from these 6 slicers together as a single query.

Click here to read in detail about this from Zoe Douglas , where she also explains the things to be kept in mind for both buttons & slicers while implementing this.

So, were there any workarounds by which we could achieve this before?

One way I can say is with the help of 'Bookmarks'. Although this doesn't reduce the number of queries to this extend, from a user experience perspective we can enable 'Clear All' with 'Selection' & 'Bookmarks'. If you are someone who achieved similar solutions, please feel free to share your approach as comments.

With the new release version of Power BI, this is going to reduce all those workarounds, & take the user experience & performance to next level.

By the way, if you are planning to try this immediately, don't forget to enable the 'Optimize' option in preview feature to check this out :-)

#enhancing #customerexperience #microsoft #powerbi #performanceoptimization #newfeatures #reporting