1. Intro
In the early days of Power BI the Filter Pane was only available within Power BI Desktop. It was a tool that was meant for Report Builders to quickly filter and understand their data.
So when a report got published, report designers had to think how to create a user friendly solution to filter. Therefore they implemented visual slicers and people got used to it over time.
When the filter pane was finally introduced in 2018 in the service, report consumers were so used to the user interface with slicers. In addition, the benefits of the Filter Pane were minor.
Let’s have a look whether this changed over time!
2. Current State
The Filter Pane is the expandable box on the right side of each report. If it is not available in your report, it is because the report creator has hidden the Filter Pane.
If it is available for you, it is divided into 3 sections:
- Filter on visual level
- Filter on page level
- Filter on report level
You can set filters on measures as well as dimensions.
In principle, there is no limit to the number of filter elements in the filter pane. Furthermore, each element of a visual automatically appears in the filter pane at visual level.
Now, if you remember the early days of Power BI and the reports that were developed from it, you will notice that most reports had self-created visual slicers. For end users, the introduction of filter pane now gave them another filtering option.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of the new introduction?
3. Advantages of the new filter pane
Advantage 1: Mobile optimized
Filter pane is already mobile optimized and you don’t have to create a mobile friendly filter. This is for me the most important advantage.
Advantage 2: Flexibility
Once you understood the functionalities of the filter pane you can do much more than with standard slicers. You can use a relative date filter and have much more flexibility.
Advantage 3: No struggle with bookmarks
Slicer visuals take up a lot of space on the report page. As a result, you either have less space to place your images, or you have to set up your own filter area via bookmarks. But believe me, especially for beginners, this can be quite a pain.
4. Disadvantages
There must a reason why so many report developers don’t use this feature at all. So let’s have a look:
Disadvantage 1: The UI sucks
- People normally read from top left to bottom right. The filter area is simply not positioned correctly in my opinion
- The filter pane always looks a bit attached to the report and not like it is a part of the report. There is a trick to format the filter pane color in the app to make it look more integrated, but I still don’t really like the interface.
Disadvantage 2: End user don’t understand the filter capabilities
Although the filter options are quite straight forward, many report consumers have a relatively hard time with them. On the one hand, this is due to the fact that they are often not familiar with the underlying data model and, on the other hand, that there are several filter options in the filter pane.
- The user can distinguish between basic and advanced filtering. Further pitfalls are also the combination possibilities by and and or.
- Be careful where you apply the filters. They work on different kind of levels like visual level, page level, report level. The funtionality is self-explanatory, but I have often seen that report users have only filtered the visual and wonder why the metrics on the whole page are not correct.
Disadvantage 3: Control filter behaviour
You can’t disable filter functionality in the filter pane as you can with slicer filters and the “edit interactions” feature
Disadvantage 4: Understand filter mapping
If some filters only work for specific visuals it’s hard to distinguish which filters work for which visual. In slicer visuals you could e.g. put the visual and the slicer in a rectangle. This will help report consumers understand, that this slicer only works for this specific kind of visual.
5. Solution
So what do I recommend my report creators?
Well as always it depends. The main goal is always to answer the question: how can I enable my users to read and modify the content of the reports and easily understand the data?
-> Slicers are obviously the best option from the designer point of view, but I also like the flexibility that comes with the filter pane.
At the moment I’m still more inclined to make my own pop-out filter pane using bookmarks. If you want to learn to create those, just let me know in the comments below.
If you are interested, there is also another great article from Johnny Winter, which you can find here:
https://greyskullanalytics.com/should-you-hide-the-filter-pane-in-power-bi/
