Page Filters vs Filter Pane

DAX Report Design Showcase
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Just adding my 2 cents here…

Stage 1 - When I first started designing in PowerBi, the filter pane did not exist, and so I used a LOT of tricks to put filters on the page without having them always visible (such as a hide/show panel controlled with buttons and bookmarks). A pain for designing, but great for my users.

Stage 2 - filter panel came along, and decided this was my solution. I didn’t need to hide the filters anymore, the filter panel would do this for me! Great, right?
Not so much… when I don’t hide the filter pane, I have to control the filters for each visual, are they going to be visible (confusing many of my users), or will I have to hide every element of each visual?
And my users get frustrated needing to go to the filter panel for things like date EVERY TIME.
Also, you can’t control what visuals are being filtered by items on the filter pane.

Stage 3 - I went back to all filters on the report, labeling one page as “filters”, and just provided a button to zip back to the filter page for the users. Again, not ideal.

Stage 4 (current stage, and a compromise) - I now limit myself to no more than 4 slicers on a page, and any additional filters go into the filter pane.
Filters on the page are of the following types:

  1. anything that needs to filter only certain visuals
  2. filters that are going to be used most commonly by my report consumers (like date or account rep)
  3. anything that I think will add to the visual story of the page (possibly an account name, or product category)

Filter Pane:

  1. The filter pane is always open when users first open the report (that is the state I upload it in)
  2. any bookmarks are made with the filter pane open (again, easier for users)
  3. yes, I am meticulous about the visual filters on the filter pane, one of the last things I do before uploading a report to the service is to check EVERY visual (card, slicer, table, chart, etc) to be sure that all of the filters on that visual are hidden. I only want my users to see filters from the “on this page” or “on all pages” sections.

Hope this helps some. And yes, Harsh has definitely provided a wealth of data in his post above. Good luck.

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