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Announcing the New Filter Experience for Power BI Reports

Headshot of article author Sujata Narayana

The wait is over!

This month we are incredibly excited to announce that the new filter experience is now generally available! We have updated the look and feel and added a ton of new functionality.

Let’s walkthrough what’s included in the new filter experience!

Pop-up Filter List

With the new filter experience, report consumers can hover over the filter icon in the visual header to see a read-only list of all the filters or slicers affecting that visual. This makes it super easy for end users to understand what filters are applied to a visual.

Here are the types of filters this view shows:

  • Basic filters
  • Slicers
  • Cross-highlighting
  • Cross-filtering
  • Advanced filters
  • Top N filters
  • Relative Date filters
  • Sync-slicers
  • Include/Exclude filters
  • Filters passed through a URL

Format and Theme

Report creators now have control over the look and feel of the filter pane. The goal here is make your filter pane feel cohesive with your report.

You can also modify the default formatting of the filter pane with a JSON theme file.

Lock and Hide Filters

You can now lock filters so that report consumers can see that those filters are applied but they cannot modify them.

Additionally, you can hide filters from your report consumers. Hiding filter cards is typically useful if you need to hide data cleanup filters that exclude nulls/blanks or unexpected values. Hidden filters don’t show up in the filter pane nor the filter dialog for a visual.

Sort Filters

Report creators can custom sort their filters in the new filter pane. This is helpful if you want certain filters to be pushed to the top or if you want certain filters to be next to each other.

You can also choose to alphabetically sort the filters.

Rename Filters

You can double-click on the filter card titles to change the display name so that they are more user-friendly for your report consumers.

When you update the display name, it also gets updated in the filter dialog.

Capture Filter State in Bookmarks

With the new filter pane, you can capture the visibility and expanded or collapsed state of the filter pane in your bookmarks. This is useful when you want to customize how the filter pane fits into your data story:

  • Hide the pane when you don’t need it.
  • Collapse the pane when you need more horizontal real estate for your canvas.
  • Keep the pane visible and expanded when you want users to interact with it.

Thank You!

Special thanks to the preview users who provided early feedback and helped us improve. If you haven’t already, start using the new filter experience today and let us know what you think! 🙂

– Power BI Desktop Filter Pane Team