Interactions In Power BI

Power BI is a unique tool for reporting and data visualization. The easy-to-use interface with intuitive design makes it a piece of cake to work with even for a beginner.

An interesting feature of Power BI is that users can interact with the reports on each page, observing the relation each report has with the other.

For example, here is a table.


Now, on Power BI, I’ve created a page of reports which has:

1. A pie chart with gender distribution.
2. A table with names.
3. A bar graph with age distribution.
   
   
   
   Now, if I want to know the gender distribution of people who are 10 years old, all you need to do is click on the bar representing the age 10 and the corresponding data will be highlighted on the pie chart. Here, you can also see the names of the people of that age group.
   
    
   
   This interaction helps the users get more information from the report which was not possible if the reports were just static ones. While this interaction can also be achieved with a few other tools, the work that needs to be put in is enormous. But, with Power BI, just a few clicks have made the effort of making the report next to nothing.

However, there may be cases where you would not like each and every report to  react to interaction in the report. Sometimes, the default interaction may also cause some reports to behave in a way that does not resonate with the actual underlying data.

Keeping this in mind, Power BI has now created options to control the interaction between the reports on the page.

To control the interaction of a report, follow the following steps:

1. Select the report you want to control the interaction in.
   
   
2. Now, go to the Format section in the ribbon.
   
   
   
   
3. Click on Edit Interactions.
   
   
   
   
4. Now, you can see a few icons on top of each report. The icons will be different according to the type of report. 
   
   On the table, there are just 2 icons for filter and no reaction; while for the bar graph, there are three – filter, no reaction, and highlight.
   
   
5. For now, I will click on None, so that the table does not change when I interact with the other two charts.
   
    
   
   
6. You can similarly change the interactions with other reports as will.

The final results look like this.



Now, you can see how the table did not react to the changes in the report as compared to the initial interaction it had.