A cool feature of Power BI's visualization is how the visuals can interact with each other, which produces a coherent and interactive report. However, sometimes you may want to customize the interactions between the visualizations, which is actually quite simple to do. This function is available in both Power BI desktop and Power BI service, but today's tutorial is in Power BI Desktop.
What is interaction between visualizations?
In today's tutorial, we will be using the Northwind dataset, a Microsoft sample dataset, to demonstrate how to edit interactions between visualizations. In the image below, you can notice that when the category "Beverages" is selected in the matrix on the left, some portions of the column chart are highlighted. The highlighted sections represent the total sales of "Beverages" for each year. That is how these two visualizations interact. Power BI allows you to customize whether you want visuals to interact or not, how they interact with each other, and which visuals to interact with.
How to edit interactions?
There are two visualizations in the report: the matrix on the left and the column chart on the right. If you want to edit how the column chart interact with the matrix when you select a visual element in the matrix, then you can first select the matrix, then select "Edit interactions" in the "Format" tab of the ribbon.
Once you have clicked on Edit interactions, you will see small icons at the top of each of your visuals for the following options: 1) filter, 2) highlighter, 3) none.
Filter, highlight, and none are the three options on how you can customize the interaction between visuals. Let us discuss each option.
1. Filter: When you select this option and then click on an element in a visualization, the other visuals will show a total change to the visualization depending on the filter applied to the visualizations.
2. Highlight: The highlight option shows the slice that is impacted. In other words, it will show the slice of data you chose compared to the rest of the data. This is the default option.
3. None: You can choose to turn off the interactions between visuals. When you select a visualization in the matrix, nothing changes on the column chart.
Turn off Edit Interaction setting
Once you are done with editing the interactions, you can click on the "Edit Interaction" button in the "Format" tab again to turn off the function.
Conclusion
These editing options allow your Power BI reports to flow better and display information that you want your users to see. Go ahead and try this technique for your reports, Enjoy!