Building a report page: visuals, slicers, filters and drill-through

What report users see is the page: a few visuals, some slicers, and the ability to click a bar and watch the rest update. Screening questions on Power BI often describe a chart and ask which visual or which setting produces it. This lesson covers the choices that come up most.

Matching the visual to the question

• Trend over time: line chart, with the date on the axis.
• Compare categories: bar or column chart. Sort by value unless the order has meaning.
• One number that matters: card, or KPI if you have a target.
• Part of a whole with few parts: donut or stacked bar. More than five slices becomes unreadable.
• Many rows to look up: table or matrix. A matrix adds row and column groups with subtotals.

Example 1: "Show monthly revenue by region for the year." A clustered column chart with Month on the axis and Region in the legend works, but a line chart with one line per region shows the trend more clearly. Either is defensible; a pie is not.

Filters: slicer, visual, page and report

A slicer is a visual on the page that the user clicks. The Filters pane has three levels: this visual, this page, and all pages. Use the pane for fixed conditions such as "exclude cancelled orders", and slicers for choices the user should make.

By default, selecting a bar in one visual cross-highlights the others (dims the non-matching part) rather than filtering them. Change this with Edit interactions: select the source visual, then set each other visual to filter, highlight or none. Example 2: a card showing total sales should usually be set to filter, so clicking a region shows that region's total instead of a dimmed full total.

Drill-down and drill-through

Drill-down works inside one visual when the axis has a hierarchy, such as Year, Quarter, Month. The arrow icons on the visual move one level down for all bars or for the one you click. Drill-through moves to another page filtered to the item you right-clicked. Example 3: a summary page shows sales by customer; a detail page lists that customer's orders. Put the Customer field in the detail page's drill-through well, and the summary page gains a right-click option that opens the detail page already filtered.

Common mistakes and a practice habit

• Too many visuals on one page.
• Dragging a numeric column into a visual and then wondering why the total is a count or an average. Write a measure.
• Leaving cross-highlight on a table, which confuses readers who expect filtering.
• Forgetting to sort the month axis by month number, so it shows April, August, December.

Take any sales or expenses table and build one page with exactly four visuals, two slicers and one drill-through to a detail page. Then show it to someone and ask them a question the page should answer without your help.