Edit interactions is a Power BI features that is used to control the interaction of visuals in report page.
By default all visuals in power bi report page are interactive with each other that means, If you select any value in slicer it filters all other visuals in the report page, in similar way if you select any item in chart visuals that will affect the value of other visual too.
In Power BI, you can control this interaction of visuals using the feature edit interactions.
Lets take a look on below sample report page, here we have a sample dataset of cars.
Report having a table visuals, slicers and pie chart.
Table visual is displaying the car details in terms of Make, Model, Type and Origin.
Slicer contains the unique Type of cars.
Pie chart dispalying the Origin – Type wise % data.
Visuals interactions
Lets select the one value from slicer visual to see, how the visuals in report page are interacting with each other ?
Here we have selected a value ‘Sedan’ from slicer.
As you can see, as soon you select a value ‘Sedan’ from slicer, automatically other visuals are affected and sort the records for ‘Sedan’.
Table visual sorts the records for ‘Sedan’, and Pie chart also sort the data only for ‘Sedan’.
Now without doing any change in report page just click on Europe slice in Pie chart, and you will notice that Europe slicer is highlighted in pie chart, and records in table visual is sorted for Origin ‘Europe’ only, also remember, visuals were already sorted for type ‘sedan’ , now it gets filtered for Origin ‘Europe’ as well.
This is the default features of visuals in report page, they are interacting with each other, does not matter either you select values from slicers or select any item on visuals.
Interactions on visuals can be controlled using Edit Interactions feature.
Control Visual interaction using Edit Interactions
In case, if you want to control the interaction of any visual, or slicer on other charts, use edit interactions feature. Following are the steps.
First Refresh the report page, or clear all the filters on report page to avoid any confusion.
Suppose, you do not want to affect table visual on the selection of values in slicer visual, means you want to control the interaction of slicer for table visual, and selecting any value on slicer will not affect the records on table visual.
Lets go by step by step:
First click on the slicer visual (do not select any value) as you want to control the interaction of the slicer.
Now in ribbon pane, you will see a format link button appears >Click on Format link button.
> Once you click on Format link button, an Edit interactions tab appears in ribbon bar as shown in below screen.
Once you click on Edit interactions tab, You see two controls (Filter and None) of interaction appears in each visuals on the top right hand side corner except that slicer visual as for slicer we are going to control the interactions with other visuals.
Take a look on Filter and NONE control.
By default it is set to Filter on visuals that means interaction will apply on visuals, if it is set to None that means interaction will not apply on visuals.
Lets set it to None for table visual , you can also set interaction for pie chart too.
But first we set it for table visual, just click on None icon > after that, click on Edit interactions to make control icon(Filter and None) disappears on report page, other wise it keeps showing on visuals.
Now after changing the interaction for table visual, Lets select any value from slicer to see whether it affect records in table visual or not.
As you can see, upon selected value ‘Sedan’ in slicer, table visual does not filter the records for ‘Sedan’, and keeps showing records for all Type while Pie chart filters the records for ‘Sedan’.
That means on the selection of slicer, the interaction does not affect table visual.
In similar way you can set interaction for other visual, it is very helpful when you do not want to affect the values in any specific visual upon the selection on other visual.
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