Help Needed: Phantom Filter Issue on Dashboard Visuals

[Anonymous]

EDIT: Woooo thankfully this was just my inexperience's fault rather than a software bug and had a quick fix. @Ramsblood DM'd me the solution. I had a slicer that was hidden and could only be seen by going to the Selection pane! 

Hi all,

I recently encountered a frustrating issue with a Power BI dashboard. It was functioning perfectly until I saved the .pbix file, closed it, and reopened it. When I reopened the file, a few visuals were broken. I managed to fix all of them except for one.

Here's the problem: one specific visual—and any newly created visuals—now seem to have a filter applied to them that shouldn’t exist. These visuals didn’t have this filter before saving the file. I’ve tried all the usual suspects, like checking the filter pane, visual interactions, and slicers, but none of these seem to explain the issue.

To investigate, I stripped the dashboard down to just two visuals:

1. An old card visual that is working correctly.
2. A new card visual that has this unexpected filter attached. (which is literally copy-pasted from the old working card...but any new visual has it attached regardless)

The only way I’ve found to disable this phantom filter is by completely removing the associated data field from my model. Unfortunately, this is not a viable solution, as I need this data for my dashboard.

I’m completely lost as to what could be causing this. If anyone has insights or has encountered something similar, I’d appreciate the help. (To make matters worse, this issue arose just as I was presenting my work to a stakeholder. Not a great moment—thanks, Microsoft!)

Thanks in advance for any guidance you can provide!

Here is a photo where I am showing the filters on the old card (there are none)

And here is a photo of the card below showing the Municipality filter set to North Vancouver - C

Again. These are literally the only two visuals on the dashboard....and even if I delete these two visuals so workbook is literally empty and I create a new visual it still has this filter.

[johnt75]

You could try adding a filter to the page or report using that field, and see what filters your visual shows. Then remove the filter and see if that clears it.

[Anonymous]

Tried this and it didn't work. I can apply the filter to the whole page and/or report and remove it and it does nothing. When the Municipalities field is put on the page and/or report level it shows all of the values but in reality only the value being allowed by the phantom filter is able to be shown.

[johnt75]

Do you have row level security in place? Could that be causing the filtering ?

If not then there's only a couple of things I can think to suggest. Either open a support ticket with Microsoft, they've always been really good whenever I've had to do that, or save a copy of the report as a PBIP - you may have to enable all the PBIP options in Preview Features. Once you've saved it you could do a text search across all the files for Municipalities and see where that field is being used. It might help you to identify why the filter is being applied.

[Anonymous]

Hi @Anonymous ,

I create a table as you mentioned.

Then I create a card visual and use a Filter on it.

So you can close it on Filter bar.

Best Regards

Yilong Zhou

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Anonymous]

I appreciate you trying to help but this was obviously one of the first things I tried. This doesn't work because the filter does not appear in the filter bar. The filter is only visible by clicking the filter icon on the visual itself. See screenshot below where cleary I have the visual selected, it has the filter on it, but shows no filters in the filter bar menu.

[Ashish_Mathur]

Hi,

Could you share the download link of the PBI file.

[Anonymous]

I don't see any option to upload it here....I put it on a gofile but if there is a better way let me know. 

removed download link. Someone helped me some this in DM. will edit main post.