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tom-lenzmeier
Helper I
Helper I

Default Date For Date Slicer

Greetings!

I'm wondering if there's been a solution for displaying the current month-year as the default date in a slicer. Many of the YouTube videos I've looked at all have something like "Current Month/Year" as a text field in the date slicer. In my fantasy world, rather than a text field, I'd like to have the display be the current month year --> Sep 2025. There was a visual in the marketplace called "PreSelected Slicer," but it doesn't seem to work well. If worse comes to worse, I'll go with the text approach. Thanks in advance.

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION
Shubham_rai955
Power Participant
Power Participant

Hi @tom-lenzmeier , Power BI doesn't natively allow slicers to always default to the current month. To mimic this, add a calculated column to your date table marking the current month (e.g., "Current" or offset = 0), use it in a slicer, and pre-select it before publishing; with custom visuals like "Button Slicer," selection can update automatically after refresh

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7 REPLIES 7
audreygerred
Super User
Super User

I prefer using the filter pane for a several reasons filters - one of them is this... If you have a date field in your filter pane, you can have it set to 'Is in this month' or whatever you need and then if your users need something different, they simply change it - and not just change how many months, they can change it from relative to advanced to basic filter so they get full range of motion 🙂

 

audreygerred_1-1757111369074.pngaudreygerred_2-1757111392197.png

 





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v-tejrama
Community Support
Community Support

Hi @tom-lenzmeier 

Thank you @Shahid12523   for the response provided!

Has your issue been resolved? If the response provided by the community member addressed your query, could you please confirm? It helps us ensure that the solutions provided are effective and beneficial for everyone.

Thank you for your understanding!

 

Hi  @tom-lenzmeier ,

 

I wanted to check if you had the opportunity to review the information provided. Please feel free to contact us if you have any further questions.

 

Thank you,

Tejaswi.

 

Shahid12523
Community Champion
Community Champion

Best Option: Use a Relative Date Slicer → set to “In the last 1 calendar months.” Add a card with:

CurrentMonthYear = FORMAT(TODAY(), "MMM YYYY")


→ Shows “Sep 2025” dynamically.

 

Alternative: In your Date Table add:

IsCurrentMonth =
IF(YEAR('Date'[Date])=YEAR(TODAY()) &&
MONTH('Date'[Date])=MONTH(TODAY()), 1, 0)


Then use this in the slicer, preselect “1.”

Shahed Shaikh
alish_b
Continued Contributor
Continued Contributor

Hey @tom-lenzmeier ,

I would suggest going with the text approach. At present, it is the cleanest approach to meet your requirement.


There is a sticky selection issue (or feature) in Power BI slicers. If you select something, it will retain that selection even if that selection is no longer available in table or the context (in simple terms, if you have two slicers one for Category and other for Subcategory, Cat A has SubCat A to SubCat D under it and Cat B has SubCat E to H, if you had selected the SubCategory slicer first and selected SubCat A and then gone to select Category B, the SubCategory slicer would still have SubCat A selected, even though it should not be under category B, and yes if you click on the slicer, you will see that selection SubCat A at the bottom and it will vanish if you remove the check mark). And the text approach "Current Month/Year" cleverly exploits this behavior. 
Well while I can think of a way where you could set up a slicer that default selects the Sep 2025, but it would require setting up progressive disclosure with bookmarks and buttons, then converting the slicer to single-select with a force selection enabled along with desired sorting. Because I did something similar in the past and ended up hating bookmarks, I would not recommend this route.
Unless anyone here suggests a cleverer and clean approach, please save yourself the trouble and keep it simple with the text approach. 

 

Hope it helps!

Shubham_rai955
Power Participant
Power Participant

Hi @tom-lenzmeier , Power BI doesn't natively allow slicers to always default to the current month. To mimic this, add a calculated column to your date table marking the current month (e.g., "Current" or offset = 0), use it in a slicer, and pre-select it before publishing; with custom visuals like "Button Slicer," selection can update automatically after refresh

How to make the Date slicer without the slide range (slider) and only one date with calendar icon which should work as the real life calendar to slecte a particular date like if we slecet between , before or after, each case there is two slecteion of date showing by default, by i don want like that.

is it possible that with only one selction with calendar icon to go through more date ?
so that user can slecet any date any year or month?

 

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