Power BI tips

Reset every filter at once
Stop visuals from moving
Focus mode: read one visual full-screen
The report file is self-contained
Millions of rows need a powerful computer

Reset every filter at once

Both reports carry a set of slicers, and it is easy to lose track of what you have filtered down to. Rather than clearing each slicer by hand, use the Clear all filters button on the report page to return every slicer and filter to its default in one click.

In Power BI Desktop a plain click only selects a button, so that you could edit it; it does not trigger it. To run the button, hold down the Ctrl key and click it.

Hold Ctrl and click Clear all filters

Every slicer and page filter resets to its default at once.

This Ctrl+click rule applies to all buttons in Power BI Desktop, not just this one. In the published Power BI service (the browser portal) a normal single click is enough — the Ctrl key is only needed in Desktop.

Stop visuals from moving

When you click around a report — selecting slicer values, expanding the Decomposition Tree — it is easy to accidentally drag or resize a visual and disturb the layout. Power BI has a switch for exactly this: on the View ribbon, turn on Lock objects.

With Lock objects on, the visuals stay put: you can still click, filter and drill as normal, but nothing can be moved or resized by accident.

Lock objects is not saved in the file

Power BI does not save this setting. It is a per-session toggle that resets to off every time you reopen the .pbix, so switch it on again each session. This is a gap in Power BI itself — there is no way to make it stick — not something specific to these reports.

Focus mode: read one visual full-screen

Some visuals are dense — the Decomposition Tree in particular, and the wide detail tables. Rather than squinting at them in their normal tile, blow a single visual up to fill the whole canvas.

Click the visual
Hover over it.
Click the Focus mode icon
The diagonal expand arrows in the visual's top-right corner.
Click Back to report
This returns you to the full page.

Focus mode is ideal for working through the Decomposition Tree one branch at a time, or for scrolling a long file or job detail table. All your current slicer selections still apply — you only enlarge the view, you do not change the data. It works on any visual: tables, the matrix, the tree map and the donuts, not only the Decomposition Tree.

The report file is self-contained

The reports use Power BI import mode, so a refresh stores a compressed copy of the data inside the .pbix file. That makes the file self-contained: copy it to any machine with (free) Power BI Desktop and it opens with no database, server or credentials, showing the data exactly as of the last refresh.

To pull current data, press Refresh — this reloads the model from the BI database over the SMARTBI ODBC data source. Anyone who has that ODBC source configured can refresh; anyone who does not simply keeps the embedded snapshot, which is exactly what you want for a handover or audit copy.

Millions of rows need a powerful computer

Power BI holds the whole report in the computer's memory while it is open, and a refresh needs up to twice that. To analyse many millions of rows — a migration of tens of millions of files — you need powerful hardware with a lot of memory, sometimes 96 GB. On a computer with too little memory the refresh slows to a crawl or fails.

Open the report on the best machine you have, and hand the saved file to others: they see the data as of the last refresh without needing the memory for a refresh. See Size the servers for a large migration and Hardware/VM requirements.