article 24047

Power BI Copilot And Report Filters And Slicers

In my last post I talked about how to push Power BI Copilot to get answers from the semantic model rather than the report you’re looking at. If you want to do this you are probably getting worse answers when Copilot goes to the report than the semantic model; before you try to bypass the report, though, it’s worth spending some time tuning how Copilot works with reports and to do that you need to understand how it works. In this post I will describe one important aspect of this that I’ve recently learned about: how Copilot behaves when filters and slicers are present on a report.

Using the same semantic model I’ve just in all my recent posts on Copilot, I created a report with a single card visual on showing the value of a measure called Count of Transactions with no other visuals or filters:

Using the prompt:

What is the value of Count of Transactions?

Gives the same value shown in the card, as you would expect:

The fact that the result comes in text form and the presence of a citation (the [1] at the end of the response which, when you click it, spotlights the card visual) tells me that Copilot answered this question using data from the report. Changing the prompt to filter by a County, like so:

What is the value of Count of Transactions for the county Devon?

…now gives me a result in the form of a visual:

This indicates that the result came from the semantic model because it could not be derived from the report.

What if the County field is added to the report as a slicer like so?

The second prompt above now gives the same answer but in a different way:

This time the textual answer and the presence of a citation shows that Copilot derived the response from the report. Clicking on the citation now not only spotlights the card visual but also shows that Copilot selected the county Devon in the slicer to get that result:

Also when you click on the citation in this response in the Service (but not in Desktop) a message is displayed at the top of the report telling the user “Copilot filters temporarily applied”:

The same thing happens if there is no slicer but if basic page and report level filters (but not visual level filters – the docs explicitly call out that that this is not supported and it looks like there is a bug here at the moment that results in incorrect results) are present. Here’s the report edited to remove the slicer and replace it with a page-level filter:

And here’s what the second prompt above returns for this new version of the report, and the citation is clicked to spotlight the card visual so it shows the result:

What’s more, editing the report so the filter is an Advanced Filter on the first letter of the name of the County like so:

…means that prompts like this:

Show the Count of Transactions for counties whose name begins with the letter H

…can be answered from the report too. Here’s the response to the prompt above with the citation clicked, the card spotlit and the new filter applied by Copilot shown:

I’m sure I’ve seen all this happen a hundred times but it’s only now that I’ve done these tests that I understand this behaviour, and now I understand it I can use it to design reports that work better with Copilot and troubleshoot problems.

[Thanks to Carly Newsome for telling me about this]