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Power BI Slicers, the Filters Pane and Edit Interactions

Michael Nocito · Updated August 2026 · Behaviour checked against Microsoft's own documentation, linked at the end

This page gives you control of what a click does in your report. One click on a bar can filter one visual, dim part of a second, and change nothing on a third, all at the same time. Nobody chose that: it is the default, and the default is not a single behaviour. By the end you will know which behaviour you are getting, where to change it, and how one slicer drives three pages at once.

What you do: select a visual, open Format ▸ Edit interactions, and set each other visual on the page to Filter, Highlight or None on purpose. That is the whole job, and it is saved with the report, so your readers get what you chose.

The short version. Clicking a visual filters or highlights the others. Which one you get depends on the target visual, until you set it yourself.

Slicers and the Filters pane do the same job in different places

Before the comparison: both can filter a page to one region. What actually differs?

Where they live, and therefore who uses them. A slicer is a control on the canvas, so the current selection is visible without opening anything. The Filters pane sits beside the canvas and holds filters at three scopes: this visual, this page, and all pages.

That table is Microsoft's own, and it settles the question people ask first. Neither one is more powerful. You are choosing whether the filter is part of the reading experience or part of the plumbing.

The practical rule: if a reader needs to know a filter is on, it is a slicer. A report-level filter in the pane is invisible to somebody who never opens the pane, and an invisible filter on a published number is how a report gets quietly mistrusted.

One more default worth knowing: slicers filter every other visual on the page, including the other slicers. That is why picking a country empties the city slicer of everything outside it, and it is switched off the same way as everything else on this page.

What a click actually does, and the part that surprises people

First: you click a bar. Do the other visuals filter down to that bar's category, or do they keep everything and shade the rest?

Both, on the same page. The documentation is explicit that visualizations "cross-filter and cross-highlight the other visualizations on the page" by default, and then adds the line that explains every confusing report you have ever opened: you can only cross-filter line charts, scatter charts and maps. You cannot cross-highlight them.

So the behaviour is decided by the target, not by you.

Say out loud why that matters for a total. Cross-highlighting keeps the whole shape on screen, so a reader can compare the part to the whole. Cross-filtering removes everything else, so a total in the corner drops to the selection. On one page, at one click, some of your numbers changed and some did not.

That is the exact moment to stop accepting the default. Decide which of your visuals is the context that should stay whole, and which is the detail that should follow the selection.

Edit interactions, in one pass

Before the steps: the setting is per pair, meaning you set what this visual does to that visual, one target at a time.

1. Select the visual people will click.
2. In Power BI Desktop, choose Format ▸ Edit interactions. In the Power BI service, open the report in Editing view, select Visual interactions and turn on the Edit interactions toggle.
3. Small icons appear on every other visual: Filter, Highlight, None. The bolded one is what is currently happening.
4. Set each one, then repeat from step 1 for the next visual people will click.

The choices are saved with the report, so your readers get the behaviour you set rather than the default. And if you only have Reading view access, or the report was shared with you, you cannot change any of this, which is worth knowing before you spend twenty minutes hunting for the menu.

Two habits that make this quick. Set the page's headline card or total to None for most clicks, so the top-line number stays stable while people explore. And set anything acting as a legend or a reference to Highlight, so the whole remains visible.

Drilling does not do what you expect either

First: you drill from Year into Quarter inside one chart. What happens to the other visuals on the page?

Nothing, by default. Drilling a visual does not affect the others, which surprises everybody the first time, because it looks like the page should follow.

You can change it. In Desktop, turn on drill down for the visual, then Format ▸ Apply drill down filters to ▸ Entire page. In the service, open Visual interactions and set Drilling filters other visuals to On. Now drilling down and back up moves the whole page with you.

Whether you want that is a real decision. Following the drill makes the page feel like one connected thing. Not following it lets someone dig into one visual without losing their bearings on the rest. Pick one and be consistent across the report, because the worst version is a report where some pages follow the drill and others do not.

Sync slicers: one control, several pages

Before the steps: your report has three pages and every one of them needs the same Region filter. How many slicers do you build?

One. On the View ribbon, select Sync slicers. The pane appears between the Filters and Visualizations panes, and it gives you two separate columns of tick boxes for each page.

Those two are independent, and that is the whole feature. A page can be synced without showing the slicer, and Microsoft states the consequence plainly: selections made on other pages still filter the data on that page.

Picture a reader landing on page 3 from a bookmark, seeing no filter controls at all, and reading numbers that are filtered to a region somebody chose on page 1. That is a supported design and a real support ticket. If you sync without making the slicer visible, put the current selection on the page some other way, in a title or a card, so the reader can see the state they are in.

Two extras from the same pane. Under Advanced options you can give several separate slicers a shared group name, then sync their filter changes, their field changes, or both, which is how you keep two slicers over different sources in step. And on a page with many slicers, Insert ▸ Buttons ▸ Apply all slicers lets a reader make several selections before anything requeries, which is a performance fix as much as a usability one.

Edge cases worth knowing

Adding a slicer to a page clears existing bookmarks on that page. If you have already built bookmarks and you drop in a new slicer, the slicer is cleared in them. Rebuild the bookmarks after the slicers are settled, not before. Bookmarks are covered in drillthrough and bookmarks.

Cross-highlighting a matrix built from several tables can error. Microsoft documents that selecting multiple items at different levels of a hierarchy in a matrix built from fields in different tables produces errors on the other visuals. If a page throws errors only when somebody multi-selects, that is where to look.

A synced slicer can be moved and resized per page. It arrives in the same position and size, and you are free to place it differently on each page afterwards without breaking the sync.

Slicer selections are not the only filter in play. A visual can carry its own visual-level filter, the page can carry a page-level filter, the report can carry a report-level filter, and row-level security can be filtering underneath all of it. When a number looks wrong, check all four before touching the model. RLS is in row-level security.

Why the default is split

Cross-highlighting exists to answer "how much of this is that", and it only works when the whole is still on screen. A bar chart can show a paler full bar behind a solid selected portion, so the part and the whole are visible at once.

A line chart cannot do that honestly. Shading part of a line does not mean anything, because a line's meaning is in its shape over the axis, and a partial line is a different shape, not a highlighted one. The same goes for a point on a scatter and a shaded region on a map. So those three filter instead: they redraw with the selection only.

Once you know the rule is about what the visual type can honestly show, you stop needing to memorise the list. Anything that can hold two quantities in the same mark can highlight. Anything whose meaning is its shape has to filter.

How to apply this to your own work

1. Open your most used report and click one bar. Then look at every other visual on the page and say which of the three things happened to it.
2. Anywhere the answer surprised you, set that pair explicitly with Edit interactions rather than leaving it.
3. Set the page's headline number to None for the clicks people make most, so the top line does not move while somebody explores underneath it.
4. Decide once, for the whole report, whether drilling moves the page, then apply it everywhere.
5. Any slicer you sync but hide gets its selection printed somewhere on the page. A filtered number with no visible filter is the one readers stop trusting.

If you have paper nearby, sketch your busiest page as boxes and draw an arrow from the visual people click to every other box, labelling each arrow filter, highlight or none. The arrows you cannot label are the ones to go and check.

Cheat sheet

The one habit to keep

Before you publish a page, click the thing a reader will click first and watch every other visual on the page. If you cannot explain what happened to each one, your reader will not be able to either, and they will not ask. They will just believe whichever number they read.

On the report you own, what is the one number that must never move when somebody clicks around, and is its interaction set to None right now?