This article describes what a Slicer visualization is, and how to apply it to Reports to produce interactive information products.
Introduction
Slicers allow database administrators and report designers to create interactive reports that allow stakeholders to explore the data without having to learn how to author reports.
When you add a Slicer to Dashboard, it will appear as a dropdown on the page. Report viewers can choose one or more categories. All other analyses on the page are filtered by this dimension. Analyses on other pages are not affected.
When used in a Report with a Notebook layout, the Slicer will apply a filter to all analysis in the entire notebook.
Adding a Slicer
Technically, a Slicer is visualization of a Pivot Table, just like a Table or Pie Chart. Slicer is now available as a visualisation type in the analysis. Slicers are combinations of dimensions that ignore measures and axis settings. When new dimensions are added to a slicer, they are automatically placed on the row axis.
There is a short cut to add a Slice from the components list:
But you can also add a Pivot Table and then change the Visualization to Slicer:
Choosing Slicer Dimensions
You can drag and drop fields to the “Slicer” axes. Fields in this list will appear as dropdowns in the Dashboard or Report. You can add multiple fields to the list, and they will appear as cascading dropdowns when viewed.
If you add multiple dimensions to the slicer, they will appear as multiple dropdowns when viewed. If the two dimensions are related, then the second dimension will be dependant on the first. In the example below, the “Sub-Sector” form is related to the “Sector” form by a reference field. So when you select “Agriculture”, only sub-sectors of “Agriculture” are shown.
Using Slicers
When a report with a Slicer is viewed, the viewer can select one or more categories from each dimension. When at least one category is selected, it is applied as a filter to all of the analyses on the Dashboard page, or throughout the whole Notebook.
In the screenshot below, there is a Slicer that has “Sector” as a dimension. When the “Livelihoods” category is selected from this dimension, then you can see that the “Projects by province” graph is filtered to only include only projects that reference the “Livelihoods” sector.
Slicers only have an affect when their dimension is related to the measures in a Pivot Table. In the example above, the Project form has a reference field that references the Sector form. This allows ActivityInfo to apply the sectoral filter.
If none of the measures are related to the dimension in the Slicer, then the Slicer won’t have an affect.
Limitations
Slicers don’t apply to interactive maps, only Pivot Tables.