4.10 Explore the filter pane - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v Instructor>In this sub-lesson, we're gonna explore</v> the filter pane. We're just gonna take a look at a few of the ways that we can modify the behavior of the filter pane. Let's go ahead and get our Power BI Desktop file open that supports this sub-lesson. Just double-click on it, and we'll wait a moment here. We have our desktop file open here. Let's go ahead and take a look at the Filters pane. We can see that we've got it closed here. If I open this up, I've got my Filters pane open up now, and I can close it back up. Also on the View tab here at the very top of the screen, I can actually turn it on and off. If I don't actually wanna show it here, I can actually go like this and completely remove it. Let's get back down over to the Filters pane. Let's go ahead and open up and start exploring some of the things that we can actually do on the Filters pane. The first thing I wanna show you here is, the Filters pane is open. First option is that we can actually turn our Filters pane on or off from our users. If I see this little eye at the top, right next to Filters here, I can click on this, and this allows to show or hide the Filters pane from the report readers. I may wanna make some configurations on here like I've done already, but I don't want the report readers to actually see it, so I can actually turn it on or off if I see fit. The next thing we wanna point out here is you can see here that I've got some filters set up on the order date year. We did this earlier. I have the ability to lock the filter, so I can go like this so that nobody can change it, or I can keep it unlocked. Right in down below here, I actually have the ability to hide the filter. Maybe I don't actually want my report viewers to actually see the filters even there. I have some fine-grain control that I can put on the individual filters that I have in the Filters pane. The next thing I wanna talk about is, a big part of the filter experience is that you can format the Filters pane to match the look and feel of your reports. With the Filters pane open, and ensuring that we have the page canvas highlighted here, we can go to the format. Go down a little bit later here and we can go into the Filters pane. We can see that there are several different formats that we can put on here. I can go ahead, and if I want to change the background like this, I can go ahead and change it to a color like that if I so chose. I'll put it back to white 'cause I really like the white. I can go ahead and (indistinct) the transparency, the font and icon colors, the text size, all kinds of different things around the filter pane. As I mentioned before, this is really in the interest of making the Filters pane line up with the way that your reporting looks. Let's go ahead and close that up. I'll close my Filters pane up. I can also go into my cards here, so I can go ahead and do some formatting on the cards themselves. Finally, you can actually go through and build theming for your Filters pane as well. Much like we set up a theme file for our actual report, you can actually go through and build theme files that are specific to the actual Filters pane itself. In addition, we can actually do some other things, which we'll talk about here momentarily. I can go and start moving filters around if I wanted to. Let's actually just go and maybe choose our total sales by year. I could actually pick the filters up and move them around if I wanted to put them into different orders. I could go ahead and do this and shuffle things around, which is quite nice. 'Cause like I say, you can take advantage of the Filters pane to give yourself more real estate on your canvas by moving filters from the slicers into the Filters pane, if you so choose. A lot of different ways that you can handle filtering in Power BI. It's really up to you as the developer to decide which methodology is actually best. That's all we really wanted to show you in this particular sub-lesson, was just the ability to go and manipulate the Filters pane to begin matching what your styles look like in your actual reports.