What Is a Chip Slicer?
A chip slicer (also called a pill filter or tag filter) renders every value of a categorical field as a small rounded button — a "chip" — that the reader clicks to filter the report. Active filters are shown by color, directly on the chip; there's no dropdown to open, no list to scroll.
It's the same interaction pattern you'll recognize from e-commerce filter bars — size, color, brand shown as clickable pills rather than a stack of checkboxes hidden behind a dropdown.
Why Not Just Use the Default Dropdown Slicer?
Power BI's native slicer works, but it has a structural limitation: state is hidden. To see which values are currently selected, the reader has to open the dropdown — which means the most important piece of context ("what am I currently looking at?") isn't visible until they interact with the filter.
- Hidden state — a collapsed dropdown shows a summary label at best ("3 of 12 selected"), not the actual selections.
- Extra clicks — opening the dropdown, scanning the list, and closing it again is friction every single time, on every page.
- Wasted vertical space — a list-style slicer expanded to always show its options eats real report real estate, especially with long category lists.
- Weak visual hierarchy — nothing about a checkbox list communicates "this is an active filter" at a glance from across the room, which matters for dashboards displayed on TVs or presented live.
A chip slicer solves all four at once: every option is visible without a click, active selections are colored distinctly, and the whole thing collapses into a single compact, wrapping row.
When Chips Work Best
- Category lists that are short-to-medium in length (a handful up to a few dozen values) — chips lose their scannability past that, same as any UI made of discrete clickable elements.
- Report headers and navigation-bar-style filter rows, where the compact horizontal layout reads like a real navigation control.
- Dashboards meant to be scanned quickly or presented live, where visible active state matters more than raw list density.
- Single-select toggles that function like a segmented control — e.g. switching a whole page between "This Month / This Quarter / This Year."
For very long category lists (hundreds of distinct values) where search-to-filter matters more than visual scanning, the native searchable dropdown is still the better tool.
Chip Slicer for Power BI
Chip Slicer renders each category value as a clickable chip, with active filters instantly visible by color — no dropdowns, no scrolling, no hidden state. It's Microsoft-certified, has zero external dependencies or network calls, and is 100% free with no tier restrictions.
What it includes
- Single-select and multi-select modes.
- Horizontal (wrapping) or vertical (stacked) layout.
- Full color control — background, border and text, independently for active and inactive states.
- An optional "Select All" chip with a customizable label.
- Slicer sync across report pages via Power BI's native Sync Slicers panel.
- Configurable chip height, radius, font size, padding and gap.
- High-contrast theme support and full keyboard navigation.
- Up to 1,000 values per field.
Getting Started
- Install Chip Slicer from Microsoft AppSource.
- Drag a categorical field into the Category well — chips render immediately.
- Toggle Multi-select and Layout (Horizontal/Vertical) in the Format pane.
- Set active/inactive colors, chip size and the optional "Select All" label to match your report theme.
If your report's filter bar is a row of collapsed dropdowns nobody opens, a chip slicer makes the current filter state visible without a single click — and there's no reason not to try it, since it's free.