How to activate highlighting function in bar visual ?

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=powerbi-desktop

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.