New features in the December 2017 update of Power BI Desktop
Part five of a six-part series of blogs

Field descriptions anyone? This is a fairly minor update, although we like responsive horizontal slicers, and there are some exciting things coming up in preview mode.

  1. December 2017 Updates
  2. Field descriptions
  3. Scatter charts now compare numerical values
  4. Responsive slicers
  5. Drilling down filters all visuals for a page (this blog)
  6. Undocumented new features

For a cumulative list of all of the updates to Power BI Desktop in the last few months, see this blog.  Our two-day Power BI Desktop course always uses the latest version of the software.

Posted by Andy Brown on 04 January 2018

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Drilling down filters all visuals for a page

Imagine that you have a chart showing total sales by family and product:

Sales by family/product

This chart is based on a hierarchy (see below).

Here are the fields for this chart:

Hierarchy in field well

Because we have two fields, we should be able to drill down to see the products for a given family.

 

Make sure you have turned drill mode on:

Turning drill mode on

One way to turn drill mode on is to click on this icon.

 

By default when you click on a family, it will now drill-down to show all the products for that family for this chart, but also filter any other visuals on the page:

Filtering by family

When you click on Bird, for example, Power BI Desktop filters the table underneath.

Here's what you'll see after drilling down to show Bird products:

Filter applied

By default all other visuals will be filtered when you drill down.

Note that this is the default behaviour from now on - if you want to revert to the previous behaviour, untick this option:

Reverting to default

Untick the Drilling filters other visuals check box to stop drill-down affecting other visuals.

If the above box is greyed out, that's probably because you haven't selected a chart which contains a hierarchy of fields (I know this because I just spent ten minutes or so trying to solve exactly this problem!).

  1. December 2017 Updates
  2. Field descriptions
  3. Scatter charts now compare numerical values
  4. Responsive slicers
  5. Drilling down filters all visuals for a page (this blog)
  6. Undocumented new features
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