Disable sorting for multiple stacked bar visual

[Anonymous]

Hi!  I need to be able to turn off the ability for users of my report to sort a stacked bar visual.

I'm working with a multiple stacked bar visual that displays the results of 10 survey questions.  There's one horizontal stacked bar per question, and the segments of the bars are the percentage of respondents who selected strongly agree, somewhat agree, etc.

I'll be putting a text box with the survey question to the left of each bar.  I don't want the users of my report to be able to sort and change the order of the bars themselves; doing so would mean that the survey question text boxes no long align with the correct bars.  How can I freeze the order of the bars (disable sort for my users)?

As a note, yes, I'm aware that it's possible to build the survey questions as bar labels into the visual itself, and that doing so would mean the labels would stay with the correct bars if the whole visual gets sorted.  That's not an acceptable solution for me, though, because I want control over the formatting of the bar labels: for example, to text-wrap them, bold certain words but not all of them, etc.  (Some of the survey questions are quite long.)  As far as I know, it's not possible to do that level of detailed formatting with built-in bar labels--but please correct me if I'm wrong!--so using text boxes seems like the best solution, as long as I can prevent my users from shuffling the bars around.

Thanks in advance!

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

I found an acceptable workaround (though not a perfect solution for all use cases).  https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Desktop/Disable-the-More-Options-available-on-the-top-right-hand-si...

Essentially, if you disable the More options menu (the three-dots menu) for that visual, it takes away the ability to sort the visual while in viewer mode.  You also lose all the other functions in that menu, such as Export data and Spotlight, but for my specific use case, it's worth it.

[Anonymous]

Hi @Anonymous ,

Based on my test, even if the users are granted with Viewer permissions, the Sort function in visualizations is still available.

But you could use "Embed to web page" to work around this problem. In this case, they will not be able to use Sort by.

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

[lbendlin]

Don't do that. Do not rob your users of their UX.  Find a different solution.