Interactions between visuals – Enhancing Reports

Interactions between visuals

One of the key powers that Power BI has is its ability to cross-filter and cross-highlight visualizations. This power creates dynamic reports that allow users to interact with the data to explore the relationships between data points, creating new insights.

As the report creator, you can control how visuals interact with each other, or if visuals interact at all. Interactivity is great, but there may be times when you want a visual on your report page to remain static. You may want to display total sales in a corner of your page, even if a report consumer filters the rest of the visuals down to a region or sales segment.

Figure 11.11 – This report page allows your report users to keep the total net revenue on the page while looking at the total net revenue for the regions

You can see in the figure that all the visuals on the blue rectangles are cross-filtered and cross-highlighted by the four region names. The card visualization in the gray box has the total for all the regions. This allows your report consumer to slice and dice the data any way they want and have a continual reference to the total number.

By default, Power BI will cross-highlight visuals when possible; it’s not possible to cross-highlight a card or a line chart, they can only be filtered. It makes sense if you think about it. You can change this default behavior in the options for the report. This is not a general setting, so it will only affect the current report.

Figure 11.12 – Changing the default cross-highlighting behavior to cross-filtering

To change how individual visualizations interact, you must enable the Edit interactions option. To enable Edit interactions, select any visual on the report page to make the Format ribbon tab available. Select the Format ribbon tab and click the Edit Interactions button.

Figure 11.13 – Edit interactions is enabled from the Format ribbon tab

This will now allow you to control how visuals interact with the highlighted visualization. The icons that now appear let you choose Cross Filter and, if available, Cross Highlight.

Figure 11.14 – Enabling Edit interactions adds buttons to every visualization

It is important to understand that this choice is for how the selected visualization interacts with all the other visualizations on the report page. For the Total Net Revenue card to not be cross-filtered, you must highlight each visual and select None.

Figure 11.15 – Selecting None means the highlighted visual won’t interact with this one

You must do this for every visualization on the page. If you add a new visualization, you will have to highlight it and select None for interactions.