A fundamental skill and practice in Power BI report development is utilizing the report filter scopes and the filter conditions available to each scope. For example, a report intended for the European sales team can be filtered at the report level for the European sales territory group and specific report pages can be filtered for France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Reports can be further customized by implementing filter conditions to specific visuals, applying more complex filter conditions, and providing drillthrough report pages to reflect the details of a unique item, such as a product or a customer.

Unlike the slicer visuals and visual interactions reviewed earlier in this chapter, report filter scopes are defined outside of the report canvas. Report filter scopes, therefore, provide report authors with the option to eliminate or reduce the need for on-canvas user selections as well as the canvas space associated with slicer visuals.

With a visual selected on the canvas in the Report View, a filters pane below the visualizations icon presents the following four input field wells:

• Report-level filters:
  • The filter conditions defined impact all visuals on all report pages
• Page-level filters:
  • The filter conditions defined impact all visuals on the given report page
  • Report-level filter conditions are respected by the page-level filters as well
  • Any Drillthrough filter conditions defined for the report page are also respected
• Visual-level filters:
  • The filter conditions defined only impact the specific visual selected
  • Report and page-level filter conditions are respected by the visual-level filters as well
  • Any Drillthrough filter conditions defined for the report page of the given visual are also respected
• Drillthrough filters:
  • The filter condition, a single value from a column, impacts all visuals on the given report page.
  • Report-level filter conditions are respected by the Drillthrough filters as well.
  • Any page and visual-level filter conditions defined for the given report page are respected

Per the prior two chapters, filters are applied to Power BI visuals via the relationships defined in the dataset (via single or bidirectional cross-filtering) as well as any filtering logic embedded in DAX measures. All four of the preceding filters (Report, Page, Visual, Drillthrough) contribute to the initial filter context as described in the Measure Evaluation Process of Chapter 4, Developing DAX Measures and Security Roles. Therefore, just like filters applied on the report canvas (for example, Slicers), the filter logic of DAX measures can supplement, remove, or replace these filters conditions. In the event of a conflict between any report filter and a DAX measure expression that utilizes the CALCULATE() function, the DAX expression will supersede or override the report filter.