Level 3 · Cross-filter, cross-highlight and Edit interactions

Click a bar in Power BI and the rest of the page reacts. That reaction is not one fixed behaviour: each pair of visuals has its own interaction, and the report author decides it.

What you are working in

This quiz runs in a practice page, not Power BI. In Power BI Desktop the controls are on the canvas: select the visual whose clicks you want to change, then Format → Edit interactions (the Format tab appears in the ribbon while a visual is selected). Small icons appear above every other visual on the page. Click one per visual and turn the mode off again with the same button.

Three behaviours

• Highlight (cross-highlight): the target keeps its full values and shades the part that belongs to the selection. Lighting’s slice of each monthly bar stays bright, the rest dims. It is the default for most charts that can show a part of a bar.
• Filter (cross-filter): the target is recalculated with the selection as a filter, exactly as if a slicer had picked Lighting. The bars shrink to Lighting’s values. Cards, tables and line charts can’t show a highlighted part, so they always filter.
• None: the target ignores the selection.

To make Filter the default for a whole report: File → Options and settings → Options → Report settings (under Current file) and turn on the option to change the default visual interaction from cross highlighting to cross filtering.

Interactions and measures

A cross-filter is a filter like any other: every measure in the target visual sees it. That includes measures written to ignore a slicer. CALCULATE([Sales], REMOVEFILTERS(products[category])) stays on the whole store whether the category arrives from a slicer, a row or a click on another chart. When only one visual should stay fixed, setting its interaction to None is simpler than rewriting its measures.

Slicers have interactions too. Select a slicer, open Edit interactions, and set None on any visual that should ignore it.

Drill-down is different

Put a hierarchy on an axis (category, then subcategory, or Year, Quarter, Month from the Date table) and the visual gets drill controls. Turn on drill-down mode (the single down arrow above the visual) and clicking a bar opens the next level inside the same chart. Go to the next level shows every subcategory at once; Expand all down one level keeps the parent label. Drill-down changes what one visual shows; interactions change how the others react to it.

Common mistakes

• Editing from the wrong visual. Select the source of the click first.
• Forgetting Ctrl. In Desktop, Ctrl+click selects several bars; the targets filter by all of them.
• Mixed messages. If one chart highlights and its neighbour filters, readers stop trusting what a click means. Pick one behaviour per page unless there’s a reason.