How to Add a Filter in Power BI (Fast & Easy)

Filters are a thing of Microsoft that you will see in all their data-related applications.

And so will you see it in Power BI (the business intelligence tool by Microsoft).

It is a great tool that helps you focus only on the relevant data by taking the less relevant or the irrelevant stuff out of the frame.

Using filters, you can control the data displayed on your reports and dig deeper into the insights your data holds.

If you’re a beginner, applying filters in Power BI might be a bit challenging as we have many types of them 🧾

I will show you how to use these filters in Microsoft Power BI quickly and easily through this tutorial.

Table of Contents

What are Power BI Filters

Power BI Filters help you filter the data that you want to see/focus on only. The remaining data doesn’t go anywhere but is only timely filtered to picture the relevant data 🤔

There are three categories of filters in Power BI:

• Visual Filters
• Page Filters
• Report Filters

We have another type of filter too but that’s not similar to the abovementioned filter levels. We call them Drill through filters.

Pro Tip!

Drill-through filters allow users to navigate from a summary page to a more detailed information page for a specific data point. This helps retain the context of the summary page and allows users to deep dive into specific data points (if need be).

For example, you have created a page in Power BI that shows the overall regional sales. Now if you right-click on the sales value of a particular region and click on the drill-through button, you’ll be navigated to another page that shows the granular sales details for that region. No need for filters!

Before I take you through each different type of filter, let’s make sure we’re clear on the following:

• You can add filters while creating or editing reports in Power BI.
• You can apply these filters to Power BI Desktop and Power BI Service, both.
• In this tutorial, we are using the Regional Sales Sample file in Power BI Service.

How can you get it? Learn to get sample data for Power BI here.

Applying a Visual-Level Filter

As the name says, a visual level filter applies to a visual only 🙈

Technically, there are two ways how you can apply filters to a visual. The first is to add only the fields that you want to appear as a part of the visual and remove the rest.

From the Visualizations pane, you can see the fields added to the visual and you can make changes to them as required.

And the second is to apply filters to that Visual from the Filters pane that we are going to discuss now.

So, I have this stacked bar chart here that shows Revenue Won and Revenue in the Pipeline for different Accessories 💻

Step 1) Selecting this visual will show you all the fields included in the visual in the Filters Pane that you can filter.

Now I want to apply Filters to the Product Category field 👇

Step 2) Hover your cursor over this field to find the small drop arrow that says “Expand or collapse filter card”

Clicking on this arrow will the data behind this field that you can filter, per your choice.

Pro Tip!

You can also choose between Basic filtering and Advanced filtering as you like. Basic filtering will only give you a list of searchable and scrollable values. Whereas, in Advanced filtering, you can define rules to determine the range of values the report must return.

Let’s say I want to see the revenue for Accessories and Devices only so I will select them and unselect all other product categories.

The revenue will now only be shown for Accessories and Devices and not the remaining Product Categories.

The filters are only applied to this visual.

This is how you apply a visual level filter 😵

Taking this a step ahead, what if you want to apply filters to a visual based on fields not included in the Visual?

For example, what if I want to filter this visual based on the “State or Province” which is from the Territories table but is not included in the Visualization Pane as a field?

You simply have to drag that field to the Filters pane under “Add Data Fields here” 👩‍💻

It will appear as a Filter, and you can apply the filters as you want. Like I am filtering the visual to show revenues for certain provinces only and here it goes.

That’s how you can filter a single visual in multiple ways.

Applying a Page-Level Filter

Page-level filters are applied the same way as visual-level filters.

The only difference is that Page-level filters apply to all the visuals on a page and not only to selected visuals.

This makes it the go-to tool for creating specialized pages within a report where all the visuals are focused on a single aspect of the data 💪

Let me show you here.

On this canvas, I have two visuals.

• Revenue Won and Revenue in Pipeline (Stacked Bar Chart)
• Forecast by Territory (Matrix)

Step 1) Go to your Filter Pane to find the Page Level filters.

Step 2) Under the Filters on this Page category, apply filters on the relevant field.

Let’s say I want to see the Revenue Won only so I am applying the relevant filter to the Status✍

Since this is a page-level filter, it covers all the visuals on the page.

So, after applying the filter, all the visuals on the page now show the Revenue Won only.

That’s how page-level filters work.

Applying a Report-Level Filter

As page-level filters apply to all the visuals on a page, report-level filters apply to all the visuals on every page of a report.

The process to apply report-level filters is again the same – just the filter section changes.

Let’s demonstrate this here 💭

This time I am applying the “Revenue Won” filter at the Report-level.

Step 1) Drag the Status field from the Fields pane to the Filters Pane under the Section “Filters on all pages”.

Step 2) Expand the filtering options for this Filter by clicking on the small drop arrow next to it.

Step 3) Apply the filter to “Won” by selecting the checkbox for it and unselecting all other checkboxes.

After the filter has been applied, you’ll see all the visuals across the entire report begin to show data related to “Revenue Won” only and the “Lost” and “Open” revenue have been removed from the visuals.

That’s how report-level filters work in Power BI 🤩

How to Reset All Filters

Even when you navigate away from the report or the page where you applied filters, Power BI will retain the filters and slices that you have applied.

If you used the filters only for presentation purposes and do not want Power BI to retain the changes, you must reset the filters from your report 📨

To reset filters:

Step 1) Go to the top menu > Buttons.

Step 2) Click on the Reset option from the drop-down list to add the Reset button.

Once the button is added to the screen, you can click on it with the Control key to delete whatever filters you’ve applied to your report.

Conclusion

After reading this tutorial, now that you know the filters that exist in Power BI and how to apply them, you can streamline the data shown in your reports and make the best out of your data analysis 🥂

Using filters effectively helps you to create dynamic, streamlined, and interactive dashboards that enable you to make more informed decisions.

To learn Power BI, check out the other Power BI tutorials by Spreadsheeto too. Here are some of my top recommendations:

• How to Create Groups in Power BI: Get an Overview of Your Data
• How to Visualize Data in a Matrix in Power BI (Easy Guide)