Finding All Selected Items In A Slicer In Excel 2016 Using TextJoin()

When you are using slicers with an Excel PivotTable it’s often useful to be able to get a comma-delimited list of the items selected in that slicer for use in a report title. It’s not easy to do though, and in fact this is one of those topics that lots of people have blogged about over the years: here’s my MDX approach, here’s Erik Svensen’s post on using the new DAX ConcatenateX() function, and there are also posts by Rob Collie like this one. None of these techniques are ideal though: my personal favourite is the ConcatenateX() approach, but that only works with SSAS Tabular 2016 (and then only if you can create a measure on the model) or Power Pivot in Excel 2016, and not at all if you’re using SSAS Multidimensional or earlier versions of SSAS Tabular.

However, after discovering the new TextJoin() function in Excel 2016 the other week I realised that this would provide yet another way to solve this problem. Here’s a simple example using a PivotTable and slicer connected to a Power Pivot model:

The highlighted cell F3 showing a comma-delimited list of all the items selected in the slicer has the following Excel formula:

Important: this needs to be entered as an array formula, so instead of hitting Enter after typing in the formula you need to hit Ctrl+Shift+Enter. You’ll see the formula surrounded by braces {} in the formula bar when you do this:

This formula relies on the fact that the selection in a slicer (in the example above the slicer has the name Slicer_Product) can be treated the same as the output of the Excel CubeSet() function, which means that you can use the CubeSetCount() function to find the number of items selected and the CubeRankedMember() function to get the name of any single item in the selection. It also uses the Row()/Indirect() trick described here to create an array of numbers from 1 to the number of items selected in the slicer, which in turn provides the rank values to pass to the CubeRankedMember() function.

The beauty of this approach is that it works for Power Pivot and all versions of SSAS Tabular and Multidimensional, and doesn’t require any measures to be created on your models/cubes. It even works in Excel Online, so it will work inside Power BI, although it doesn’t seem to be possible to create array formulas in Excel Online yet so you need to create the formula on the desktop before you deploy. Of course you need the latest build of Excel 2016 for all this to work, and at the time of writing most people don’t have Excel 2016 and even if they do they probably won’t have a build (Version 16.0.6568.2025 or higher) with TextJoin() in it yet. But this will be a great solution in the distant future when everyone has Excel 2016, I promise!

You can download the sample Excel 2016 workbook here.

I also have to acknowledge the help of David Hager in writing this formula – we had a conversation about how TextJoin() behaves in array formulas in the comments of my earlier post and in doing so he provided the basic approach for me.