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Replacing Bidirectional Filters with Visual Filters

Alberto Ferrari shows how you can replace bidirectional filters with visual filters in Power BI and improve visual quality:

The noticeable thing about the behavior of the slicer is that the two matrices are showing only the brands and colors purchased by Amanda. Yet, the Color slicer is still showing all the colors, even though we know Amanda only purchased three colors: Grey, Silver and White.

The reason is that the matrices, like most Power BI visuals, hide rows if the measure they are showing produces a blank. Because Amanda did not buy any pink product, the value of Sales Amount for Pink results in a blank, therefore the matrix removes the pink color from its result. Prior to the May 2019 release of Power BI, slicers did not display this behavior because slicers did not have a measure to evaluate – they would only show a list of values from a column; Moreover, visual-level filters were not allowed in slicer visuals whereas they were available in other visuals such as charts, tables, and matrices.

Read on to see how to do this.