Interactivity can be one of the most important components of a report. It allows you to engage the user, fit more information on a page and adds to the user story.
In PowerBI, adding interactive features such as highlighting and filtering is straightforward and easily customisable. When a user clicks on a certain part of a graph, we can customise the interactivity so that the other visualisations within the report change. An example of this is clicking on a country in a map visualisation so that all the other visualisations on the page filter to results for that country only. Alternatively, we could highlight certain results. For example, we could have a feature that highlights certain points in a scatter-graph.
Filtering is automatic on PowerBI. We can change filtering to highlighting, or remove the feature completely for individual visualisation by selecting the target graph, going to the format tab and selecting edit interactions. This will reveal either two or three icons above each graph; the filter icon, hide icon (to turn off filtering) and in some cases, the highlighting icon.
Slicers are another great way to make reports dynamic. They are interactive visual controls that allow users to filter data in the report. Users can select values from a slicer and the associated visuals on the report will automatically adjust to reflect the chosen filtering conditions. They support various types of data, such as dates, text, or numerical ranges.