A Power BI pop up filter panel is a slide-out menu that holds your slicers off-canvas and appears only when the user asks for it. Consequently, you get the filtering without losing a fifth of the page to a slicer column. This guide builds a pop up filter panel from scratch, then shows the shortcut I use now.
Filters are one of the most requested features in any Power BI report. Consequently, the biggest question is not how to build one. It is where to put it, so the report stays functional without giving up half the canvas.
The slide-out filter panel is not a new technique. However, most versions look bolted on: a grey rectangle sliding over a report it does not belong to. Therefore, this guide spends as much time on making it look designed as on the mechanics.
- You need three things: a grouped container, two bookmarks and two buttons.
- Uncheck Data on the open and close bookmarks, or selections get wiped.
- Similarly, scope both to Selected visuals, not the whole page.
- Carry the gradient from the collapsed rail into the panel so there is no seam.
- Reset is the exception: it needs Data switched on.
- An agent can now build it and check the render itself.
Why the native Filters pane loses
Power BI already ships a Filters pane, so the obvious question is why anyone builds their own. In short, the native pane is a developer tool that happens to be visible to users.
Desktop gives you several places to put a filter, and that is part of the problem. You can use the Filters pane, expanded or collapsed. You can scope a filter to one page, to every page, or to a single visual. Meanwhile, most people skip all of that and drop slicers straight onto the canvas.
Each option works. However, the user may not know the pane exists, may have forgotten it is there, or may struggle to tell one kind of filter from another.
The before state: filters everywhere
For example, here is the same report before the panel existed. Filters sit in three places at once — a column of eight slicers down the left, two more in the header, and the native Filters pane open on the right.
Honestly, this works. Nothing here is broken, and plenty of production reports look exactly like this. On the top edge, though, you can only fit a few slicers before it gets cluttered. Similarly, on the left you eventually run out of space.
It costs roughly a third of the canvas, and at that point it stops looking aesthetic. That is a personal judgement rather than a rule — it is okay, it just is not good, and there are better ways to do it.
Indeed, left, top or the pane on the right — each has a case, and the usual outcome is all three. Consequently, the page slowly loses its visual appeal until the design reads as accumulated rather than decided. That is precisely why I moved the whole thing into a pop up filter panel: the same filtering, none of the clutter, and one deliberate answer to the placement question.
Native Filters pane versus a pop up filter panel
| Native Filters pane | Pop up filter panel | |
|---|---|---|
| Styling | A handful of theme properties | Anything you can draw |
| Discoverability | Collapsed by default and easy to miss | A labelled button you place yourself |
| Field control | Shows every field on the visual | Exactly the slicers you chose |
| Canvas cost | Permanent width when expanded | Zero when closed |
| Build effort | None | Twenty minutes, or one prompt |
To be fair, the native pane is better for ad-hoc analysis. People sometimes need to filter on fields nobody anticipated. For a published report with a defined audience, though, a curated panel wins on every axis except build time.
The Filters pane is a tool for the person building the report. A pop up filter panel is a tool for the person reading it.
Anatomy of a Power BI pop up filter panel
Every working pop up filter panel has the same six parts. Once you can name them, the build stops feeling fiddly.
- The panel container — specifically, a rectangle or background shape sized to the panel, anchored to one edge.
- Your slicers — placed on top of the container, not floating loose on the page.
- One group — container and slicers grouped together in the Selection pane so they hide and show as one object.
- The open button — usually a filter icon, or hamburger icon sitting in a collapsed rail.
- The close button — an arrow or cross inside the panel itself.
- Two bookmarks — one with the group visible, and one with it hidden.
Notably, the group in step three is what makes the rest simple. Without it you are toggling eight objects by hand, and one of them will always get missed.
A Power BI pop out slicer is three objects and two bookmarks. Everything that goes wrong with one goes wrong in the bookmark settings, not the design.
Build the pop up filter panel step by step
Here is the full manual build. Furthermore, these steps work in any recent version of Power BI Desktop and need no custom visuals.
Step 1 — draw the filter panel container
Insert a rectangle shape and size it to the panel. In my reports it sits flush against the left edge, roughly 330 pixels wide and the full height of the canvas. Additionally, give it a fill that matches your report background rather than a default grey.
Step 2 — add the slicers
Drop your slicers on top of the rectangle and align them to a consistent left margin. Similarly, keep vertical spacing even — an 8 or 16 pixel rhythm reads as deliberate, random gaps do not.
Step 3 — group everything
Open View > Selection. Select the rectangle, the slicers, the close button and any labels, then right-click and choose Group. Rename it to something obvious, such as Filter panel. Consequently, one visibility toggle now controls the whole assembly.
Step 4 — create the two bookmarks
Open View > Bookmarks. With the group visible, add a bookmark and name it Panel open. Then hide the group and add a second one named Panel closed. In other words, each bookmark is simply a saved visibility state.
Step 5 — configure each bookmark properly
This is where most builds go wrong, so it gets its own section below. For now, right-click each bookmark and set it up like this:
- Display — ticked. Specifically, this is what carries the show and hide.
- Data — unticked. However, otherwise the bookmark restores old slicer selections.
- Current page — ticked.
- All visuals — changed to Selected visuals, with the group selected.
Step 6 — wire up the buttons
Select the open button, then set Action > Type to Bookmark and pick Panel open. Afterwards, do the same for the close button and point it at Panel closed. Finally, hold Ctrl and click each button in Desktop to test, because buttons do not fire on a plain click in edit mode.
The two traps that break every pop up filter panel
Almost every broken pop up filter panel comes down to one of these two settings. Above all, check these before rebuilding anything.
Trap 1 — the Data checkbox wipes the filter panel selections
By default a bookmark captures the data state as well as the visual state. So a user picks 2025, opens the panel, closes it again — and the panel snaps their selection back to whatever was active when you saved it.
The fix takes two seconds: right-click the bookmark and untick Data. Keep Display ticked. Do this on both the open and the close bookmark.
This is not a workaround, incidentally — it is what Microsoft recommends. The official bookmarks documentation puts it plainly: when you use bookmarks to switch between views, you likely want to turn off data properties so filters are not reset.
Trap 2 — page-scoped bookmarks fight your other bookmarks
A bookmark set to All visuals captures every object on the page. Consequently, opening the filter panel can reset a chart someone toggled, or undo a different bookmark entirely.
Switch each bookmark to Selected visuals and select only the filter panel group. In effect, the bookmark then does one job and stays out of the way of everything else on the page.
Making the pop up filter panel look designed
Mechanically the pop up filter panel now works. Visually, however, this is where most builds stop and it shows. The difference between a panel that looks native and one that looks pasted on comes down to three details.
Carry the gradient through the seam
In the report above, the closed state is a narrow icon rail with a dark gradient. When the panel opens, that same gradient continues across the wider panel without a visible join. Consequently, the panel reads as the rail growing rather than a new object appearing.
There are two ways to achieve it. Either bake both the rail and the panel into one canvas background image and reveal the wider region. Or give the panel shape a gradient fill whose start colour matches the rail exactly at the seam. I prefer the image route, because Power BI shape gradients are limited.
Match the corner radius and the padding
If your cards use an 8 pixel radius, the panel should too. Similarly, if your cards have 16 pixels of internal padding, the slicers inside the panel need the same. Small inconsistencies here are what make a report feel amateur even when nobody can say why.
Give the icons a resting state and an active state
The icon rail needs to show which panel is open. I use two versions of each icon, a muted ink one and a bright accent one, then swap them with the same bookmarks that drive the panel. For more on this kind of detail, see my dashboard design best practices and the canvas size guide.
A filter panel is only as good as the slicers in it, and those depend on a clean date table and sensible relationships. DataCamp runs practical Power BI, DAX and data modelling courses, and new users get a discount on their first subscription.
Explore DataCamp courses →The reset and apply pattern for a pop up filter panel
Once users can filter from a panel, they will ask for a way to clear it. Fortunately, this is one extra bookmark — but it is the one bookmark that breaks the rule above.
- First of all, clear every slicer on the page so nothing is selected.
- Add a bookmark and name it Reset selection.
- Right-click it and this time leave Data ticked, because restoring the cleared data state is the entire point.
- Additionally, untick Display so pressing reset does not also close the panel.
- Point a button inside the panel at that bookmark.
Open and close are display-only bookmarks. Reset is a data-only bookmark. That one distinction explains almost every broken filter panel.
In other words, once you see it that way the whole pattern stops being confusing.
The fast path: let an agent build the pop up filter panel
Everything above is the manual way to build a pop up filter panel, and it is still the right way to learn it. Nevertheless, I do not build panels this way any more, and the version in the screenshots was not built that way either.
Since Power BI reports can be saved as PBIP projects, every page, visual and bookmark is a JSON file on disk. Consequently, an AI agent can write them directly. What changed recently is that the agent can also see the result, through the Power BI Desktop Bridge — it reloads the file in Desktop, captures a screenshot and corrects its own mistakes. Microsoft documents the feature itself in What is the Power BI Desktop Bridge.
That combination is what makes this practical for a filter panel specifically. Bookmarks are the most error-prone part of the build, and they stay invisible in the file until you render the page. For example, a bookmark scoped to the wrong visual looks perfectly fine in JSON.
How I actually built the one in the screenshots
The design was not mine to begin with. Specifically, I saw a report in the Fabric community gallery where clicking a filter icon opens a second panel carrying the same gradient, and I wanted to know whether I could recreate it.
So I took a screenshot of it, plus a second screenshot of the report I was already working on. Then I asked Claude Design for a few variations in the green theme I use. I picked one, exported it as a PNG, and handed that to Claude Code together with the Power BI report authoring skill. The instruction was roughly this: copy the overview page, build a pop up panel, adjust the background SVG, and fill it with these filters.
Afterwards it planned for about six minutes, then came back with two questions: panel width, and which block should be active. I took the recommended answer to both. After that I did not touch anything. Power BI Desktop was effectively being operated by Claude while I watched the screenshots come back.
To be clear about the result, a couple of elements needed rework afterwards. The back option did not really show, and one or two things did not quite make sense on screen. You still need a few rounds of iteration. But the gradient waves and the divider lines line up exactly, and by hand that would have taken me hours — assuming I could have done it at all.
Watch the pop up filter panel get built
The full session is on video, mistakes included. In particular, watch what happens after each screenshot — that feedback step is the entire difference.
If you want the tooling rather than the technique, the Power BI report authoring skill guide covers what Microsoft ships and how to install it. Additionally, the five levels of AI in Power BI development puts this in context, and the code-first shift explains why any of it is possible.
The design itself is not mine. Credit to Gus Barros in the Fabric Community gallery, whose executive report gave me the idea.
Download the free .pbip
Reading about bookmarks is a poor substitute for opening a working file and clicking through it. Therefore, the report shown throughout this article is available as a free Power BI project.
The full .pbip with the gradient panel, the icon rail, every bookmark and the reset button. Open it, break it, reuse it.
Download the free .pbip →If you would rather build the background than reverse-engineer mine, four ways to create Power BI backgrounds covers the options, and AI-generated Power BI backgrounds covers the route I use now.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my Power BI bookmark reset my slicer selections?
Because the bookmark has Data ticked. A bookmark saves the data state alongside the visual state, so it restores whatever was selected when you created it. Right-click the bookmark, untick Data, and keep Display ticked. Do this on both the open and close bookmarks.
Can I hide the default Power BI filter pane from report users?
Yes. In Power BI Desktop go to the Format pane with nothing selected and turn off the Filter pane, or lock and hide individual filter cards. Once you have a custom pop up filter panel, hiding the native pane avoids two competing filter interfaces on the same page.
How many bookmarks does a filter panel need?
Two for open and close, plus one for reset if you want a clear-all button. A second panel on the same page adds two more. In practice, a page with four panels and a reset ends up around nine bookmarks, which is exactly the point at which delegating them to an agent starts paying off.
More questions about this
Do pop up filter panels work in the Power BI mobile app?
Partly. Bookmark buttons do fire in the mobile app, but the mobile layout is a separate canvas and does not inherit your desktop positioning. Consequently, you need to place the panel and its buttons again in the mobile layout view, and a full-height side panel rarely translates well to a phone.
How do I add a reset all filters button in Power BI?
Clear every slicer, create a bookmark with Data ticked and Display unticked, then point a button at it. Because Display is off, pressing reset clears the selections without closing the panel. Name it Reset selection so the intent is obvious in the bookmark list.
Should I group visuals or use the Selection pane visibility toggles?
Group them. A group gives you one object to show and hide, which keeps the bookmark small and stops a stray label from being left behind. Furthermore, groups survive later edits far better than a bookmark that names eight individual visuals.
Where to go next
Build the pop up filter panel manually once so you understand the moving parts. After that, read how the Power BI Desktop Bridge works and let an agent handle the bookmarks on the next report. That is the order I would recommend to anyone.
Last updated 15 August 2026. Written by Lukas Reese, a freelance Power BI consultant working with clients in Germany and the US on data modelling, DAX and dashboard design.