How to Exclude Visual from Slicer in Power BI
Power BI slicers are fantastic for creating interactive dashboards, allowing users to easily filter and explore data. But what if you want a specific chart or KPI card to remain static, no matter what’s selected in a slicer? This article will show you exactly how to exclude a visual from a slicer’s influence, giving you precise control over your reports and unlocking more sophisticated dashboard designs.
What are Power BI Visual Interactions?
Before diving into the steps, it’s helpful to understand a core concept in Power BI: visual interactions. By default, when you add a slicer to your report canvas, it's set to filter every other visual on that same page. Clicking a filter option on the slicer sends a command to every chart, table, and card to update their data accordingly.
This is often what you want. However, in many cases, you need a specific visual to ignore this filtering. For example, you might have a key performance indicator (KPI) card at the top of your dashboard showing total company-wide revenue. You want this overarching number to always be visible, even when a user filters the rest of the report to see data for a specific region, product, or sales representative.
This is where editing interactions comes in. Power BI gives you a way to override this default behavior and specify exactly how each visual should respond - or not respond - to a slicer. You can tell one visual to filter, another to simply highlight, and a third to do nothing at all.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Exclude a Visual from a Slicer
Controlling slicer interactions is handled through a straightforward, built-in feature. Let’s walk through the process with a practical example. Imagine we have a sales dashboard with the following elements:
A slicer for Sales Region.
A card visual showing Total Revenue.
A column chart showing Revenue by Product Category.
A table showing detailed Sales by City.
Our goal is to make the Total Revenue card ignore the Sales Region slicer while the column chart and table continue to be filtered as usual.
Step 1: Select Your Slicer
The first and most important step is to select the visual that is doing the filtering - in this case, your slicer. Click on the Sales Region slicer itself in the report canvas. You'll know it's selected when you see a border appear around it.
It’s a common mistake to select the visual you want to change first. Remember, you need to select the controlling visual (the slicer) to define how it interacts with everything else.
Step 2: Navigate to the 'Format' Ribbon
With the slicer selected, look at the main Power BI ribbon at the top of the window. Several contextual tabs will appear. Click on the Format tab.
Step 3: Click on 'Edit Interactions'
Within the 'Format' ribbon, you'll find a button labeled Edit interactions. Click this button to enter interaction editing mode. You’ll immediately notice that small icons appear in the top-right corner of every other visual on your report page. These icons are the controls you'll use to change the interaction behavior.
Step 4: Understand the Interaction Icons
When you enter Edit interactions mode, you’ll see two or three icons on the other visuals. These define how that visual will react to selections made in your chosen slicer:
Filter (Bar chart icon): This is the default setting. The visual will be filtered to show only the data corresponding to the slicer selection.
Highlight (Pie chart with a highlighted slice icon): This option dims the overall data in the visual and highlights the portion relevant to the slicer selection. It’s useful for seeing a value in the context of the whole, but not all visuals support this option.
None (Circle with a slash icon): This is the option we're looking for. It completely disables the interaction, and the visual will ignore any selections made in the slicer.
Step 5: Change the Interaction for Your Target Visual
Now, find the visual you want to exclude - our Total Revenue card. You will see the little filter and none icons above it. The "Filter" icon will appear darker, indicating it's the current active mode.
Click the None (circle with a slash) icon to change the interaction. The icon will turn black to confirm that this visual is now set to ignore your slicer.
Step 6: Exit Edit Interactions Mode and Test
To turn off the editing mode, you can either click the Edit interactions button on the ribbon again or simply click on a blank space in the report canvas. The small icons on your visuals will disappear.
Now, test your work! Select different regions in your slicer. You should see the Revenue by Product Category chart and the Sales by City table update automatically with each click. Meanwhile, your Total Revenue card should remain completely unchanged, always displaying the grand total from all regions.
Practical Use Cases for Disabling Slicer Interactions
This technique is deceptively simple but incredibly powerful for building more insightful dashboards. Here are a few common scenarios where you’d want to exclude a visual from a slicer:
1. Displaying "Grand Total" KPIs
This is the most common use case. Dashboards almost always include a few key metrics that display the overall health of the business. You want cards for Total Sales, Total Users, or Total Pageviews to remain constant as a benchmark while users filter the detailed charts below them.
2. Comparing a Segment to the Whole
Imagine you want to compare the performance of a specific product against the company average. You could set up two visuals:
A line chart showing "Company Average Sales per Month" that is set to ignore a product slicer.
Another line chart showing "Selected Product Sales per Month" that filters based on the product slicer.
This allows a user to select a product and see its trend line directly compared to the overall company average, which remains stable in the background.
3. Multi-Slicer Reports
Sometimes you have multiple slicers, but not all of them should apply to all visuals. You might have a "Date" slicer that should affect everything, but a "Sales Manager" slicer that should only filter a table showing sales team performance, leaving company-wide metric visuals untouched.
4. Information and Instructional Visuals
If you have a text box or card with instructions, definitions, or image logos on your report, you wouldn't want it disappearing when a filter is applied. Setting its interaction to "None" ensures these static elements are always visible to the user.
Pro-Tips for Using Visual Interactions
Once you get the hang of it, you can take visual interactions a step further. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:
UX is Key: Make it obvious to your users that a visual is intentionally static. A simple change in the visual's title from "Revenue" to "Total Company Revenue" can prevent confusion and clarify why that number isn't changing.
It Works Both Ways: Interactions aren't just for slicers. You can select any visual (like a column in a bar chart) and use the same "Edit Interactions" feature to decide how clicking it affects other visuals. For example, clicking the "Electronics" bar in a sales chart could be set to filter a corresponding profit table, highlight a map, and do nothing to a KPI card.
Interactions are Page-Specific: The interaction settings you configure apply only to the current page. If you use the "Sync Slicers" feature to have a slicer affect multiple pages, you'll need to set the desired visual interactions on each page individually.
Final Thoughts
Mastering visual interactions is a key step in moving from basic to advanced Power BI report building. By selectively disabling the connection between slicers and certain visuals using the "Edit Interactions" feature, you can create far more dynamic, insightful, and user-friendly dashboards that tell a clearer story with your data.
While tools like Power BI are incredibly powerful, they often come with a steep learning curve that gets in the way of finding fast answers. Manually configuring reports, learning the nuances of features like visual interactions, and dealing with complex data models can take hours out of your week. With our platform, Graphed, we’ve simplified this entire process. Instead of navigating menus, you can just ask a question in natural language like, "Show total sales that stays fixed and a bar chart of sales by region that I can filter," and instantly get an interactive dashboard built for you - no learning curve required.