Chapter 9 · 8 levels
Interactivity
Slicers and the three filter levels, Top N filters, cross-filtering and Edit interactions, tooltips, bookmarks and buttons, and the DAX that keeps a measure honest when the reader clicks: ignoring a slicer, Top N as a measure, and titles that follow the selection.
StartA static report answers the question its author thought of. An interactive one answers the reader’s: pick a channel, click a bar, hover a point, press a button, and the page shows that slice. Interactivity hands control from the person who built the report to the person reading it, and that is most of what makes Power BI worth opening every morning.
It also creates a new kind of bug. Every click becomes a filter, and every measure on the page reacts to it, sometimes in ways the author never planned. A “share of total” that turns into 100% the moment someone uses a slicer, a title that still says “All channels” after the reader picked one, a Top 10 that quietly shows nine: these come from not knowing which filters a measure sees.
In this chapter you work on both sides. In the quizzes you decide where a filter belongs (visual, page or whole report), when a click should filter and when it should only highlight, what a report-page tooltip adds over the default one, and what a bookmark actually stores. In the DAX levels you write the measures that make interactivity trustworthy: a total that ignores one slicer on purpose, a Top 3 that matches the visual’s Top N filter, and a title that names whatever the reader selected.
Power BI Desktop runs on Windows only, so the DAX levels use a practice report built into the page: the slicer selections are listed above the matrix, and the engine evaluates your measure in every cell with those filters applied. Every lesson gives the exact menu path to do the same in Power BI Desktop. The chapter ends with a boss level: three measures for a channel page that has to stay correct whatever the reader clicks.
Levels
- What a slicer does to a measure
from Rachel Moreno, Regional Sales Manager
slicer, filter context, removefilters, calculate
- Visual, page or report filter?
from Kevin Hartley, Ecommerce Manager
filters pane, visual filter, page filter, report filter, top n
- Cross-filter, cross-highlight and Edit interactions
from Lauren Fischer, Category Manager, Lighting
cross filter, cross highlight, edit interactions, drill down
- Top 3 products as a measure
from Marcus Bell, Head of Merchandising
topn, top n filter, calculate, values, filter context
- A title that follows the slicer
from Jenna Walsh, Marketing Manager
selectedvalue, dynamic title, text measure, conditional formatting
- Default tooltips and report-page tooltips
from Tyler Grant, Customer Service Lead
tooltips, report page tooltip, tooltips well, page information
- Bookmarks and buttons
from Amanda Price, Director of Operations
bookmarks, selection pane, buttons, show hide
- Boss: a channel page that survives every click
from Brian Foster, Head of Mobile App
slicer, removefilters, divide, selectedvalue, format, filter context