The Slider Control in Looker Studio allows users to filter numerical values in your report by using a sliding control element.
As with previous posts on controls, for the examples in this one, I’ve used the Superstore Products dataset. To learn more about this dataset and access the data, visit this link.
For the examples in this post, I’ve used the Superstore Products dataset. Visit the post on how to add data sources to Looker Studio, if you need a refresher.
1. When to use it?
Use the Slider Control when you want to enable users to filter by numerical values.
2. Example
Let’s create a table with Product name, Transaction ID, and Row ID as dimensions, along with Quantity and Gross revenue as metrics.
If you want to learn more about tables in Looker Studio, visit the post on this type of chart.
With the Slider Control, you can filter by the number of products in the row. To do this, configure it as follows:
Where it says Default selection, you have the option to display the range that will be selected by default. For instance, if you want the range to be from 5 to 14, you would set it there, but in this case, we’ll leave it empty.
3. Important Note
It’s worth highlighting that the Slider Control doesn’t allow selecting a dimension to group the metric. For instance, if you remove the Row ID dimension from the table and leave only the Product Name dimension, you may notice that the highest quantity is 876. However, the slider’s maximum only shows 14. This happens because the maximum value is based on your ungrouped data—in other words, it refers to individual row entries. That’s why I included the Row ID in the example table, as the slider control uses the minimum and maximum values when the data is not grouped by another dimension (like Product Name).
In the report we created at the beginning of this section, you can see that the maximum quantity is 14.
What do you think of this type of control? Do you find it useful even though it doesn’t allow grouping quantities by other dimensions?