How to Apply Multiple Filters in Power BI

Building a report in Power BI is just the first step, the real value comes from being able to slice and dice your data to find specific insights. Applying a single filter is straightforward, but things get more interesting when you need to combine multiple conditions to answer more detailed questions. This guide will walk you through exactly how to apply multiple filters in Power BI, from the basics in the Filter pane to more dynamic and advanced techniques.

Understanding the Power BI Filter Pane

Before layering filters, it's essential to understand where and how Power BI applies them. The Filter pane, typically found on the right side of the Power BI Desktop canvas, is your primary control center. It has different levels or "scopes" where you can apply filters, and knowing the differences is fundamental.

Here are the four types of filters you’ll encounter:

• Visual-level filters: These apply only to a single, selected visual on your report page. If you want to filter a specific bar chart to show data for just one product category without affecting any other charts, this is the filter you use.
• Page-level filters: As the name suggests, any filter applied here will affect all the visuals on the current report page. This is perfect for when you want a whole page to be themed around a specific year, region, or department.
• Report-level filters: This is the broadest scope. A report-level filter applies to every single page and visual in your entire Power BI report. It’s useful for setting a global context, such as filtering the entire report for a specific company division or excluding test data from all calculations.
• Drillthrough filters: This is a more specialized filter that passes context from one page to another. When a user right-clicks a data point (like a bar on a chart) and selects "Drillthrough," they are taken to a detailed page that is automatically filtered for the specific data point they selected.

Understanding these scopes is crucial because it determines which parts of your report are affected when you start combining multiple filter conditions.

Applying Multiple Filters to a Single Visual

Let’s get to the core task: filtering a visual based on several conditions at once. By default, when you apply multiple filters to a visual, Power BI uses AND logic. This means that for a data point to appear, it must satisfy all the conditions you've set.

Imagine you have a sales table and you want to see the total revenue for “Laptops” sold in the “North” region in “2023.” To do this, you would need to apply three separate filters.

Here’s the step-by-step process:

Step 1: Select Your Visual and Open the Filter Pane

Click on the chart, table, or card you want to filter. With the visual selected, look at the Filter pane. You will see a section titled “Filters on this visual.”

Step 2: Drag Your First Filter Field

From your Fields pane, find the Region field. Click and drag it into the “Add data fields here” box within the “Filters on this visual” section.

Step 3: Set Your First Condition

A new filter card for Region will appear. For this example, we’ll use basic filtering. Simply check the box next to “North.” Your visual will instantly update to show data only for the North region.

Step 4: Add Your Second and Third Filters

Now, repeat the process for your other conditions.

• Drag the Product Category field into the same “Filters on this visual” area. In its card, check the box for “Laptops.”
• Drag the Year field into the same area. In its card, check the box for “2023.”

After adding all three filters, the visual is now showing you data that meets all three criteria simultaneously: Region is North AND Product Category is Laptops AND Year is 2023. This is multi-filtering in its most direct form.

A Note on OR Logic

What if you wanted to see sales for “Laptops” OR “Tablets”? When dealing with multiple values within a single field, basic filtering naturally uses OR logic (e.g., checking both "Laptops" and "Tablets" shows data for either).

But what if you need to use OR between two different fields? For instance, "show me customers from the United States OR customers who have spent over $1,000." This gets more complicated and is usually a job for DAX, which we'll touch on later.

Using Slicers for Interactive Multi-Filtering

The Filter pane is great for you, the report creator, but it’s not very intuitive for end-users who just want to explore the data. For that, slicers are a much better choice. Slicers are essentially on-canvas visual filters that let anyone interacting with the report apply filters without needing to open the Filter pane.

Using multiple slicers is an excellent way to enable multi-filtering for your audience.

How to Create Multiple Slicers

1. Deselect everything: Make sure no visuals are selected on your report canvas by clicking on some empty space.
2. Add the first slicer: In the Visualizations pane, click the Slicer icon. An empty slicer visual will appear.
3. Add a field: From the Fields pane, drag a field into the slicer. For example, drag Product Category onto it. You’ll now have a list of categories that users can click to filter the page.
4. Repeat for other filters: Repeat the process to create more slicers. You might create one for Year, another for Sales Region, and a third for Customer Segment.

Now, a user can select “2023” from the Year slicer, “Desktop Computers” from the Category slicer, and “West” from the Region slicer. Just like with the Filter pane, this combines the filters using AND logic, and all visuals on the page will update to reflect these combined selections.

Tips for Better Slicers

• Formatting is key: Select a slicer and go to the Format pane. Under "Slicer settings," you can change the style from a vertical list to a dropdown or tiles, which can save valuable report space.
• Enable 'Multi-select': By default, users can click multiple items in a list by holding down the Ctrl key. For a more obvious experience, you can enable a "Select all" option or add checkboxes under the slicer's formatting options.

Advanced Multi-Filtering Techniques

For more complex scenarios, you might need to go beyond the Filter pane and slicers. Here are a couple of advanced methods.

1. Cross-Filtering and Cross-Highlighting

This is Power BI's built-in interactive filtering. By default, when you click on a data point in one visual (like the “USA” bar in a “Sales by Country” chart), it doesn't just filter other visuals - it highlights the portion of those visuals that relates to “USA.”

You can change this behavior. Select a visual, go to the Format menu, click Edit interactions, and choose how you want other visuals to react: highlight, filter, or do nothing. By setting interactions to Filter, you can create a powerful, intuitive experience where clicking on “USA” in one chart and “2022” in another chart effectively applies both filters to the rest of the report page.

2. Using DAX Measures for Complex Filter Logic

When you need filter logic that the standard tools can't handle, it's time to turn to Data Analysis Expressions (DAX). DAX allows you to write formulas that define new calculations and measures, giving you complete control over your filter context.

The most important DAX function for filtering is CALCULATE. It lets you evaluate an expression (like SUM of Sales) but with modified filters.

For example, let's say you wanted a specific measure for sales of “Monitors” in the “East” region, and you didn't want it to be affected by other slicers. You could create a new measure with this formula:

East Region Monitor Sales = 
CALCULATE(
    SUM(Sales[Revenue]),
    'Products'[Category] = "Monitors",
    'Regions'[RegionName] = "East"
)

In this formula:

• SUM(Sales[Revenue]) is the expression we want to calculate.
• 'Products'[Category] = "Monitors" is our first filter condition.
• 'Regions'[RegionName] = "East" is our second filter condition.

CALCULATE applies both of these AND filters, giving you a precise measure that you can use in any visual. This is the most powerful method for embedding complex, multi-condition filtering directly into your data model.

Final Thoughts

Applying multiple filters in Power BI is all about telling a more specific story with your data. Whether you’re stacking conditions in the Filter pane for your analysis, setting up interactive slicers for your team, or writing complex DAX measures, mastering these techniques lets you move beyond high-level views to answer the detailed questions that drive decisions.

We believe that getting these kinds of answers shouldn’t require navigating menus or learning a new formula language. With Graphed, you can remove that complexity entirely. Instead of manually building a view with multiple filters, you can just ask a question like, "Show me our revenue from laptops sold in the North region last year." Our AI builds the visualization for you instantly by connecting to your sources and applying the necessary filters behind the scenes, turning hours of report building into a 30-second conversation and making deep data analysis accessible to everyone in your organization.