Interactive Dashboards

Interactive Dashboards

Building interactive dashboards using Format Pane, filters and slicers functionalities

In this section of our Power BI course, we’ll learn how to create interactive dashboards using tools like Format pane, filters and slicers functionalities. These features make your dashboards more dynamic, allowing users to explore data easily.
    1. Format Pane
    The Format Pane in Power BI is where you can make your charts, graphs, and visuals look nice and easy to
    understand. It’s like customizing the look of your projects to make them clear and attractive.

• How to Use the Format Pane

1. Select a Visual: First, click on any chart or graph that you’ve created in Power BI.
2. Open the Format Pane: On the right-hand side, you will see the Format icon (it looks like a paint roller). Click on it to open the Format Pane.
3. Explore the Formatting Options: The pane will show different categories depending on the type of visual you’ve selected.

• What Can You Do in the Format Pane?

1. Size and style
• You can choose different colours for your charts, bars, lines, and even backgrounds. For example, if you’re making a sales chart, you could use green for high sales and red for low sales.

2. Title and Axis Settings:
You can change the title of your chart to make it more meaningful. For example, “Sales by Category.” General>Title

3. Add Data Labels:
If you want to show the exact values on your chart (like showing how much money was made by each product), you can add data labels to your bars or points. Turn on Data Label and customize values, units(e.g., none, thousands or millions) and value decimal places.

In Power BI, there are plenty of formatting options beyond the basics, these tools help you make your reports look even better, try to explore them by yourselves.

1. Filters
• What is a Filter? A filter allows you to control which data is shown in your visuals. For example, you can filter data by date, product, or region.
There are different types of filters you can use in Power BI: Basic Filtering, Advanced Filtering, and TOP N Filtering.

1. Basic Filtering
Basic Filtering lets you filter data by selecting one or more values from a list. It’s the simplest and most commonly used type of filter.
Example:
If you have Sum of Sales amount by Product, you can use Basic Filtering to show Sales amount only for specific Products, such as “Headphone”, ”Monitor” and “Laptop.” It is also useful when you have blank or null values in your data and you want to remove them.
How to Use Basic Filtering:
1. Select a visual(e.g., Sum of sales amount by Product name),go to the Filter Pane.
2. Under Basic filtering, you’ll see a list of all the values in that field (e.g., Headphones, Laptop).
3. Check the values you want to display in the visual.

2. Advanced Filtering
Advanced Filtering gives you more control over how data is filtered by allowing you to apply conditions (e.g., greater than, less than, contains, etc.). Advanced Filtering is useful when you need to filter data based on ranges, specific conditions, or text-based criteria.
Example:
If you have Sales amount by Product name data and you only want to display Products having sales greater than 10000$, you can set up an Advanced Filter to show only those Products.
How to Use Advanced Filtering:
1. Select the visual(e.g., Sum of sales amount by Product name) and open Filter pane.
2. Select Advanced filtering under the filter options. Set your condition (e.g., is greater than) and set a value(e.g., 10000)
3. Click on apply the filter.

3. TOP N Filtering
TOP N Filtering allows you to display only the top or bottom N values based on a specific measure, such as the highest sales, the most frequent categories, or the lowest expenses.
Example:
If you want to show only the top 3 Regions by Sales, you can use TOP N Filtering to limit the data to just those top 3 Regions.
How to Use TOP N Filtering:
1. Select the visual, open filter pane. Scroll down to the Region’s field.
2. Select TOP N filtering. Enter the number of items you want to display (e.g., 3)
3. Drag the field in By value section on which to rank the data (e.g., Sales Amount). Then click on apply filter.

2. Slicers
• What is a Slicer? A slicer is a visual filter that appears on your report canvas. It allows users to click and select data interactively. We can create a single slicer on the page and it will filter all of the visualizations on that page.
How to Use Slicers?
1. Drag the slicer’s visual in Report view.
2. Drag the field in Field, to create the slicer (e.g., “Category”).

3. You can select multiple slicers at a time to filter your data. For example in below Dashboard you can see that all the visuals are showing Sales amount for Category (Electronics) and Region (Central). You can also change the slicer type in F

Course Video

YouTube Reference :

Frequently Asked Questions

Still have a question?

Let's talk

Yes, Power BI allows users to create interactive dashboards. You can use slicers, filters, and clickable elements to allow users to interact with the data and drill down into specific details.

Yes, Power BI reports can be interactive. Users can click on visuals to drill down, use slicers to filter data, and interact with charts to explore data from different angles.

An interactive dashboard allows users to engage with the displayed data by clicking, filtering, or drilling down to see different levels of information without altering the underlying data.

A Power BI dashboard is a collection of visualizations (charts, graphs, maps, etc.) that provide a high-level overview of data insights. It is a single-page, interactive report.