How to search (text content) across multiple columns in Power BI?

[Cathydu]

Hi team,

I want to provide a one-place search experience in my report across multiple table and columns. Here is the scenario, I have ID, title, customer name, requestor, 4 columns in 2 different tables. I find current search features in Power BI can only search within 1 column. Is there any suggestion to solve this problem?

Example:

ID        Title        Customer        Requestor

1          A1          C1                    Mike

1          A1          C2                    Mary

2          A2          C1                    Tom

In that 1 search box, if I search for ID=1, the table should give me 2 rows, if I search for Customer = C1, it will give me 2 rows, if I search for Requestor = Tom, it will give me only 1 row. 

Is it doable?

Thanks,

Cathy Du

[Thejeswar]

Hi @Cathydu ,

This is going to be a bit of a work, but has the potential to solve this. Of course I haven't tried this yet..

Steps:

1. Create a New Table that should have all the distinct values from all the columns in your data table

2. Build a filter (May be a search filter) on top of this newly created table

3. Now use this filtered value from the new table to compare with the values in the columns of your data table

such that if it finds a match it should return the rows

This may orr may not work directly. But atleast provide an opportunity to solve your need

Let me know your findings!!

Cheers!!

[Cathydu]

Thank you Thejeswar, can you please be more specific on the 2nd step: build a search filter on top of this new table. Because I can just build filter on single column, which means I still need several search features to each columns, not table wised. Looking forward to your expectation. 🙂 @Thejeswar 

Much thanks!

Cathy

[Thejeswar]

Hi @Cathydu ,

Sorry for late response!!

What I meant is once you build a single column table with all the distinct values from the data table, you should build a filter (Slicer) using it.

Then have a parameter that stores the value selected in this filter and using this parameter , perform a filtering on all the column (for example, if ColA = Parameter or ColB = Parameter... then .... else ...). You will most likely have a single slicer in the report for this purpose since all the column values can be selected from one slicer.

Logically, this should give you a table that has the value selected in the parameter matched with any one of the column values in the data table

Give it a try...Great if it works!! Not sure though...

Regards,

Thejeswar