Beginning Power BI for Business Users

7Relationships and Filtering

If you've come this far in the book, you're now able to build some amazing content that will unleash some deep insights into your business's data. That must feel good!

In the previous chapters, we've walked step-by-step through understanding the big picture and building content. Now that you have those tools under your belt, the approach to the remaining chapters will be more topical, intended to help you answer general “How do I do _____?” topics. In this chapter, we'll look at several ways to take your report to the next level. So, let's dive in!

FILTERING THROUGH RELATIONSHIPS

We've talked quite a bit about how important relationships are in your data model, but let's take some time to understand how they affect your report visualizations.

To understand how relationships work, let's go back to the Power BI report we built in Chapter 6. Open that report and save the report as a new file. To do that, click File and then Save As. (Otherwise, you can also just open the Chapter 7 example PBIX file from the book resources. Doing that will ensure you are starting at the same point I am in this chapter!)

Once you have the new report opened, it should look something like Figure 7.1.

In the top section of the report, we have three slicers: Year from the Calendar dim (going forward, I'll sometimes refer to a dimension table as a dim), Region from the State dim, and Description from the GDP Category dim. We have not selected anything from those slicers ...