Custom Visuals - Chiclet Slicer

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this video, we're going to look at slicers,
• 00:07 which is another way to actually be able to cross filter your reports.
• 00:11 The slicer visual is this one over here, with a little filter on it.
• 00:15 And when we click on it, we'll get another little visual that we can throw on the top
• 00:19 right-hand corner here, and I'm gonna put the location name on it.
• 00:22 And then just size it down a little bit better.
• 00:25 Now I'm not a big fan of slicers.
• 00:27 They're not the most pretty looking visual here.
• 00:30 It kinda looks like a little bit of chat box.
• 00:31 I mean they work well.
• 00:32 When you click on ethical development, it'll cross filter other reports.
• 00:36 If I hold down my Ctrl key and click on Tax Evader, you'll notice that it actually
• 00:39 adds that to the filter context as well so they're both there.
• 00:43 But what's neat about slicers is when you actually click on another visual,
• 00:46 those slicer filter contents do not disappear.
• 00:49 They now layer on.
• 00:50 So I'm now filtered down so
• 00:52 that the squints location is not showing as well filtering into wine.
• 00:56 That's something you can't do with a normal custom visual because those
• 00:59 custom visuals will toss any other filters and
• 01:01 reset, whereas with slicers they stick around.
• 01:04 Regardless I'm just gonna unfilter this guy here and go back and
• 01:07 look at the slicer a little bit more.
• 01:10 One of the challenges with slicers here is to say they're not very attractive.
• 01:14 When I go and click on the Format Paintbrush you'd think I have
• 01:17 some options to really change this up and
• 01:19 make it look a lot better, but there really isn't a lot.
• 01:22 When I go under the General Options, I can change the orientation to horizontal and
• 01:27 that will allow them to look more like these big blocky boxes,
• 01:31 I could clear this by hitting on the little eraser icon here.
• 01:35 But here's what happens when you start to actually shrink this guy down.
• 01:39 Notice how we get an arrow so now we have to scroll across.
• 01:42 It's not as robust as the old Excel slicer where you can actually see lots of little
• 01:46 bubbles and you can control how many do you want to see on each row or column.
• 01:50 For that reason, I'm gonna go and delete the slicer.
• 01:53 You see there's a better slicer, but the problem is it's not built into Power BI.
• 01:57 You have to go get it.
• 01:59 Where do you get it?
• 01:59 You get it from the store.
• 02:01 This is a custom visual is what we're looking at here.
• 02:05 Now you'll notice the custom visual gallery, if I go and I search for
• 02:08 slicer, there are a bunch of different slicers.
• 02:11 These are all little ones that can be pulled into your project and
• 02:14 actually work with.
• 02:15 And it will work just fine when you distribute them to the Web or
• 02:18 whatever you wanna do with them.
• 02:20 Now I'm going to pick up this Chiclet Slicer.
• 02:21 You'll notice it only has two stars out of five.
• 02:23 That's cuz most people actually don't know how to use it.
• 02:26 Lets go click Add, and
• 02:27 you'll notice that it tells me that it was successfully added into the report.
• 02:31 There we are.
• 02:32 And I now have my little Chiclet Slicer.
• 02:34 So I'm gonna go click on that and choose location name.
• 02:38 Now you'll notice that the slicer that we actually get now looks a little bit
• 02:42 more akin to what we saw in the old Excel slicers where we have nice little bubbles.
• 02:46 And once again, if I click on it, it will filter nicely.
• 02:49 I can hold down my Ctrl, click into something else, and it works exactly
• 02:53 like the other slicer in that it layers onto the other visuals that we have here.
• 02:58 Now these slicers are particularly cool because we actually have the ability to do
• 03:02 a lot more formatting with them.
• 03:04 If I click on the Format Painter here, you'll notice that we have the ability to
• 03:08 go in and we can change how many buttons do we wanna see in each column.
• 03:11 So I can change that to two.
• 03:13 I can go and you'll notice that this automatically changes here.
• 03:17 I have the ability to control the colors and change vertical locations and
• 03:21 all kinds of things.
• 03:22 So if I go under Chiclets here, you'll see that I can change the size of the actual
• 03:26 Chiclets themselves, and I can change what is the selected color.
• 03:29 Maybe I wanna change that to a yellow.
• 03:32 And I can change all kinds of other little aspects about this as well.
• 03:35 One thing that's kinda cool about this slicer,
• 03:37 though, is that you have the ability in here to also use an image.
• 03:43 Now the challenge for that is that we need to provide an image.
• 03:47 But the image needs to come from a URL.
• 03:49 It needs to be hosted on the Web.
• 03:51 So I'm gonna go back and quickly we're gonna build an example here.
• 03:55 I'm gonna copy this stuff off of page 2.
• 03:58 We're gonna go back into Edit Queries because we happen to have the ability to
• 04:02 build this information right now.
• 04:04 So, if I go back to the Locations table, you'll notice I have my location names.
• 04:08 I'm going to go to Add Column, add a custom call.
• 04:12 In this custom call, I'm gonna go and call, let's call it picture.
• 04:19 This is gonna be based on, and I'm wrapping this in quotes,
• 04:24 the base URL for where this image is and the location name.
• 04:30 And, ".png".
• 04:34 And this will give me the basis for forming the URL that I need where
• 04:37 we've actually stored some images for this purpose.
• 04:41 Now you'll notice that we've got these particular images.
• 04:43 If I click on the link itself, you'll see that it's got a mixture of, well,
• 04:48 most of it's lowercase, but we've got a little bit of uppercase in here, and
• 04:50 we've got some spaces.
• 04:51 Now I can't have any spaces in this because the URL doesn't have
• 04:54 a space in it.
• 04:54 So I'm gonna right-click on this and we're gonna replace values.
• 04:57 And we're gonna replace a single space with nothing, which will change this out.
• 05:02 So that now it's all been merged together, and
• 05:05 I'm also gonna right-click and I'm gonna transform this to lowercase.
• 05:09 So this will give me some nice URLs that look nice, all consistent,
• 05:13 all the way through, perfect for each location.
• 05:17 I'm now going to say home, close and apply.
• 05:22 We're gonna go back to page one here, and we're gonna go select our slicer.
• 05:26 And at this point,
• 05:27 what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back to my Locations table and
• 05:30 we'll notice that we now have our picture, which I'm gonna drag into the image area.
• 05:35 And nothing happens.
• 05:36 Our slicer still looks the same.
• 05:38 And this is the secret, is we need something in the values area.
• 05:41 So let's try the same thing.
• 05:42 Can we put the same field in here?
• 05:45 How about that?
• 05:45 And look at this.
• 05:46 Right away we get a nice big picture set for our slicers.
• 05:51 Now they're a little bit too big here.
• 05:53 So what I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna go back and
• 05:56 change the General on this guy here.
• 05:58 We're gonna put this one with three items per column.
• 06:03 Maybe I'll make it a little bit bigger in order to see what's going on.
• 06:07 So the scaling and sizing of it isn't the greatest with this particular tool here.
• 06:11 We can try and scroll it up, but
• 06:12 it doesn't really work as well that way as we might like.
• 06:15 And you can try and play around with these things.
• 06:17 I found that the sizing of these things is a little bit tough.
• 06:19 But with a little work moving some of the visuals around and tweaking some of
• 06:23 the components of the slice here, you can see that you can make it look quite nice.
• 06:27 Some of the things that I did in order to make this work, I turned off the header.
• 06:30 I changed the height of the individual Chiclets to 100 here just to make them
• 06:34 a little bit shorter.
• 06:36 And I ended up going through as well and
• 06:37 playing around with the actual image size for the images themselves.
• 06:41 Setting them up and down until I could get it working into a place where I thought
• 06:45 that it looked just perfect.
• 06:46 So now I've got something that looks pretty nice.
• 06:49 And it can be used very quickly to go and filter my dashboard in a nice and
• 06:52 intuitive and engaging way for my users.

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