Slicers are groups of fields that you will commonly want to use together when filtering within your reports.
While it is possible to filter against any field in your report at any time, slicers make select fields readily available in a single window so that you don’t have to search though hundreds of fields to find what you want. You can always add a field to a slicer after you have created it.
Choose fields for your slicers which you think you will want to use together as filtering criteria for your reports. For instance, if you will want to filter your reports using information about salesmen, you will probably want to create a slicer which has the salesman’s name, office and sales territory. You might want to add some time fields (like year, year-month and year-quarter) if you will want to be able to filter against time. If you think that you will want to filter your report using information about the components used to create products, you would probably want to include product name, product code, component name, component code, country of origin for components, component price etc.
Generally, it is a good idea to make a slicer which is linked to time (year, month, quarter etc.) as it is very common to want to filter against time. Alternatively, you can include time fields within other slicers. When you create the time dimension, you can choose to have a time slicer created automatically.
See the steps below to create a slicer.
Loading your database
Load one of the DBs used in the previous lessons:
(1) Click on the Vizubi tab in the ribbon.
(2) Click on the Open button in the Database group.
(3) Browse until you find “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Vizubi\SampleData\” then select “getting started.ndb”.
(4) Click on the Open button to load the file.
Open the Vizubi Editor
(1) Click on the Edit button in the Database group of the ribbon. This will open the Vizubi Editor.
Opening the New Slicer window
(1) Click the Slicer button in the Navigation Pane.
(2) Click the New Slicer in the New group.
(3) The New Slicers window opens.
Naming the slicer
(1) Insert a Name (no spaces or special characters).
(2) Add a Label and/or Description.
Adding fields to the slicer
(1) Click the Add button.
(2) The Select: Fields window opens.
(3) Double click on the field you want add (you can add multiple fields using CTRL+click and clicking on OK).
Saving slicer
(1) The field(s) you selected have been added to the Slicer window.
(2) Leave the flag on Create Group check box, if you want to create a group with all the fields in the slicer. See Help for more details on Groups.
(3) Click the Save and Close button to save the slicer (click Save and New if you want to save your slicer and create another one as well).
View results
(1) The new slicer has been added to the list and it’s ready to be used.
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