Forum Discussion

datntdev's avatar
datntdev
Copper Contributor
Apr 22, 2025
Solved

Performance issues with multiple slicers in "Analyze in Excel" (Power BI Live Connection)

Hi Excel Community,

We are experiencing performance challenges when using "Analyze in Excel" connected live to a Power BI Semantic Model, particularly when we have a large number of slicers applied to a Pivot Table.

Through our analysis, we've observed that when the "Visually indicate items with no data" option is enabled for these slicers, each slicer interaction seems to trigger at least two additional MDX queries. What's concerning is that these queries appear to run sequentially, meaning that with more slicers, the delay for each filter change becomes significantly longer.

We wanted to ask the community if this sequential query execution for each slicer with "Visually indicate items with no data" is the expected behavior in the current implementation of "Analyze in Excel."

Has anyone else encountered similar performance issues with multiple slicers in this scenario? If so, have you found any workarounds or best practices to mitigate these delays? We're particularly interested in understanding if there are alternative approaches to achieve the "visually indicate items with no data" functionality without incurring this sequential query overhead.

Any insights or experiences you can share would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

BI & Data Analysis
excel
power bi
  • Kidd_Ip's avatar
    Kidd_Ip
    Apr 24, 2025

    Please consider the following for your optimization:

    1. MDX Query Overhead:
      • Each slicer interaction triggers additional MDX queries to fetch data and update the slicer state.
      • The "Visually indicate items with no data" option requires Excel to evaluate all slicer items against the dataset, which adds significant processing time.
    2. Sequential Execution:
      • Queries are processed sequentially to ensure data consistency, but this can lead to delays when multiple slicers are applied.

1 Reply

  • Kidd_Ip's avatar
    Kidd_Ip
    MVP
    Apr 24, 2025

    Please consider the following for your optimization:

    1. MDX Query Overhead:
      • Each slicer interaction triggers additional MDX queries to fetch data and update the slicer state.
      • The "Visually indicate items with no data" option requires Excel to evaluate all slicer items against the dataset, which adds significant processing time.
    2. Sequential Execution:
      • Queries are processed sequentially to ensure data consistency, but this can lead to delays when multiple slicers are applied.

Resources