One of the most frequently performed operations on data is filtering it. In a multi-dimensional world, this is called “slicing the data”. The Slicers Pane contains the dimensions and the measures that are available for slicing.
Dimensions are the business objects of your data. For example, Products, Sales Territory, and Sales Channel are some of the dimensions of the sample database AdventureWorks. In a view, dimensions appear either on the grid axes or in the Slicers Pane.
Dimensions are built of members. For example, Accessories, Bikes, and Clothing are the members of the Product dimension. A dimension can be flat or have a hierarchical structure with multiple levels. The Sales Channel dimension is flat, having two members (Internet and Reseller) and no other levels. The Product dimension on the other hand is built of members in three levels: product categories, subcategories and models.
Most dimensions contain a special member called All <members>. For example, the Product dimension contains the All Products member. In most cases, the view data is sliced by this member. When a dimension does not have an All member, the data is sliced by its first member by default.
Measures are the quantitative values in the database that you want to analyze. The data in a view is displayed in terms of a measure. For example, Sales Amount, Order Count, Gross Profit, Reseller Sales Amount are some of the measures in the AdventureWorks database.
Slicing allows you to filter view data by one or more of a dimension’s members.