Dorothy's MS Office Blog: 2026

So this took me forever to find. Just like in Excel, I wanted to be able to add a checkbox in Power BI to either exclude or include something in my matrix.

Here's how I figured it out.

If you don't already have one, add a flag/indicator for what you want to exclude/include in your data.

Step 1

In the example below, I created a column called Public to include or exclude the items where my Group column in my Data table has "Public" in the field.

Public = IF(Data[Group] = "Public", "", UNICHAR(10004))

I think this is different depending on your PC, but on my PC, the UNICHAR(10004) is a check mark.

Step 2

Now that you've got a flag, go to Visualizations and add a Button Slicer, then drag your indicator into the Value field as shown below.

Your visual will look like this, and we're going to change it to look like a checkbox.

Step 3

In your Filters, filter your data to only the ones with the checkmarks. This is important because otherwise, you'll end up with multiple boxes. You only want one box that will be your "checkbox".

Now your visual should look like this.

Step 4

In your Visualizations, select Format Visual --> Visual --> Callout--> Apply settings to --> States.

Choose All.

In the Values section, I've changed the font to Segoe UI, size 14, but it doesn't really matter. Change the font color to white here.

Now, choose Selected.

In the Value section, choose the color of your checkmark. In the example below, I chose blue and I set my font to Segoe UI, size 14.

Your button will look like this when it's selected because we need to change the background color.

Step 6

To change the background color, go to Format Visual --> Visual --> Buttons and turn the Background off.

Step 7

Now let's fix the size of the button and the Title so it looks more like a checkbox.

Go to General --> Properties --> Title and turn it off.
Go to General --> Properties --> Size and set your Height and Width. In my example, I've set it to a 45 x 45 square.