How to activate highlighting function in bar visual ?

[McChem]

Hi folks ! 

I have an issue with a bar diagram. I have some reports with bar diagrams. In the bar diagram, highlighting is activated, means I click on a particluar bar and all the diagrams in the report filter to that particular bar, say a candidate. In the original report page this works fine. Now, I copied the report page, adapted it to another, very similar, dataset. In the copied report, the highlight function works in 4 of 5 visuals. Just in the one visual (a bar diagram), this does not work. Instead of highlighting the bar and filtering the other visuals for that bar, Power BI opens a kind of a focus page (that I never defined) and shows that bar only in a focus page. I can go back to the main report by using the back button. Still, the highlighting function does not work for that particular visual. Copying the original visual again and adapting it again for data input (without changing any other settings) does not work. 

Power BI course material on Udemy suggests I should look for the visual properties in the format pane and activate "tooltip" or "quick info" options. All done, without success. All the settings between the original bar visual and the new one are identical, yet the original works, but the new one does not. I am sure this is a rather stupid setting issue but it is hidden in the jungle of settings such that I cannot find it.

My Power BI desktop version is : 2.144.878.0 64-bit (June 2025)

Does anyone have an idea how to resolve this ?

Thanks !

Michael

[McChem]

Hi Rita,

thanks for these detailed insights, very useful. I understand visual interactions better now. Funny enough, the problem did not occur again after I opend Power BI today. Must have been one of these settings you mentioned. 

Yet now I have another small problem of the same kind with a table. In my report I have 2 sheets that are very similar. 1 table and 3 visuals per sheet, all feeding on the same dataset essentially. The table-to-visual interactions are set to "highlight", so when I click one entry in the table, the 3 visuals will highlight that entry. This works for one sheet, but not for the other. In the other sheet, the 3 visuals are filtered, even though the interactions are set to "highlight". I changed the settings multiple times but the behavior stays the same:

- interaction set to "none": Nothing happens (OK)

- interaction set to "filter": visuals are filtered for the table entry that is clicked (OK)

- interaction set to "highlight": visuals are still filtered (NOT OK).

The filtered data is shown correctly, so I think the model relationships are correct.

Do you have any idea about the course of this (maybe a bug ?) and how to resolve this ?

Thanks,

Michael

[Ritaf1983 · Accepted solution]

Hi @McChem 

This issue is hard to fully diagnose without access to your PBIX file, but I’ll try to give a general explanation that may help.

When you copy visuals from one page to another — or from one report to another — the interaction settings (such as highlight vs. filter behavior) do not carry over automatically. Instead, the copied visual reverts to the default interaction setting, which is usually highlight. This means it will only partially highlight related data in other visuals where a model relationship exists.

If you want the bar visual to filter the other visuals instead of just highlighting them, you need to manually set the interaction type for that visual after copying. This can be done using the “Edit interactions” button in the Format tab, selecting the visual, and then choosing the filter icon (instead of the default highlight one) on the target visuals. This must be done again every time you copy the visual.

More information aout edit interactions here :

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/create-reports/service-reports-visual-interactions?tabs=p...

If one specific visual does not affect the others, even though it looks identical, it may indicate there’s no relationship in the data model between the field used in that bar chart and the data used in the other visuals. In that case, Power BI cannot apply cross-filtering or highlighting logically.

Regarding the “focus page” behavior — it’s not 100% clear, but it sounds like you may have accidentally enabled drill-through. This can happen if a field is dragged into the drill-through section of a page, even unintentionally. In that case, clicking the bar opens a separate drill-through page with only that selection. I’ve attached a screenshot example showing this behavior.

Another possibility is that you clicked the “Focus mode” button in the top-right of the visual, which simply enlarges the selected visual without affecting any others — see screenshot attached as well.

If none of these help, I suggest saving a version of the report without sensitive data, uploading it to a public cloud (OneDrive, Google Drive, etc.), and sharing a view link here so someone from the community can look more deeply.

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