New features in the February 2018 update of Power BI Desktop
Part five of a nine-part series of blogs

You can now search for formatting properties, have slicers which work across pages and create quick measures, among other new features.

  1. Power BI Desktop - February 2018 update new features
  2. Search for a formatting property
  3. Quick Measures
  4. Synchronising slicers across report pages
  5. Multi-select data points in a chart (this blog)
  6. Overflow data labels
  7. Marking date tables as such
  8. Extra DAX functions
  9. Features still in preview as of February 2018

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

Posted by Andy Brown on 15 February 2018

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Multi-select data points in a chart

After trying to explain how synchronised slicers work, this elegant, simple change comes as a welcome relief!  Imagine that you have multiple charts on a page, and you use the Ctrl key to select certain slicers/columns:

Multiple data points

Here I've selected to show London and the South-East regions for 2015 and 2016.

 

Any other visual on the same chart will then by default cross-filter to show only data for the selected points:

Matrix filtered

This matrix shows only data for the regions and years selected.

 

One important caveat: you must keep the Ctrl key held down all the time.  If you hold it down while selecting the data points in the first chart, but then click on a data point in the second chart without holding the key down, you'll lose all your selected data points.

  1. Power BI Desktop - February 2018 update new features
  2. Search for a formatting property
  3. Quick Measures
  4. Synchronising slicers across report pages
  5. Multi-select data points in a chart (this blog)
  6. Overflow data labels
  7. Marking date tables as such
  8. Extra DAX functions
  9. Features still in preview as of February 2018
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