The new “Sync Slicers” is it better than Drill through Feature in Power BI ?

Power BI is a visualization tool for intelligence analysis. In my personal carrier I have been working with this tool for over a period of half-year and the tool is very user-friendly with engaging UI and an easier learning curve.

For the past few months, the arising question is to have a better filtering mechanism throughout the reports with multiple pages in power BI, so that people can precisely view what they want. This has been earlier enabled by the introduction of the drill-through feature which requires some hassle for the end-user to navigate to a specific point which involves multiple key presses and it is not a healthy experience in an end-user perspective. 

The newly introduced sync slicers seem to be a better alternative than the drill through but how far does it fit and is it really better than the drill through? Let’s dig more on to this, and it's you to decide.

First of all, I would like to say what does the sync slicers exactly does.

“Sync slicers are exactly what the name states, it will sync all your slicers which may be physically present or virtual across multiple pages in the same report”

For example, let’s assume you have a report for students where it has multiple pages for analyzing students’ academic performance, pastoral or maybe his sports activities and so on. So what the sync slicer does is if you select a specific student from the main page then it automatically filters all the other report pages for that specific student.

The major drawback is if you want to check the academic performance of a different student then you have to go back to the main page which has the student slicer and change it to someone else if the filter is not physically present in the academic report page.

Let’s see sync slicer in action.

You can find the sync slicer option from the view pan of the power Bi desktop as shown below.

Once you select the sync slicer’s option it will ask you to select a slicer to get started with which will apply the following two customizations.

1.        To apply a slicer to a report page physically or virtually.

2.       Enable or disable a slicer for a specific page of a report.

As you can see above once you select the sync slicer from the view pan this is what you get and now you need to click a slicer to apply customization.

As you can see once I have selected a slicer in this case it is a year slicer and it is giving me a table of option to select with where the

1.       Rows are report pages

2.       The first column is the sync option

3.       The second column is the slicer visibility

So we need to check and uncheck the relevant boxes for the sync slicers effects to take place. 

You can notice that the sync slicers is an easy to setup option and once you set this you only need one slicer to slice through all the other report pages. The major advantage is saving space in the report pages because now you don't have to allocate space for slicers in all the pages since you can apply a slicer virtually by hiding its visibility also if needed it can be set to physically present as well, also this option involves fewer button clicks which is easier for the end-users to interact.