Filters – Making our Life Easy

Filters are very useful in our daily day to day life as it helps to bring out the necessary information we require from a large volume of data. Filters act as a layer that removes the content we don’t need.  In Power BI, they are a powerful feature that brings out the selected fields from a table based on conditions applied by the user on the different rows and columns. Power BI offers us a list of features to choose from, which can be customised to bring the result based on our needs, such as ALL, ALLEXCEPT, ALLSELECTED, REMOVEFILTERS many more.

This blog is focused mainly on ALL and REMOVEFILTERS; these filters are pretty similar and work somewhat in the same way with slight differences. Let’s first look at how we can apply these filters. The syntax of each filter is similar to one another:

How are they different?

ALL is not used by itself and serves as an intermediate function that can change a set of results over which some other calculations can be performed. In contrast, REMOVEFILTERS can only be used to remove filters and cannot provide value in return.

ALL()

Let’s take an example here where we want to find the sales of a particular product concerning all the products. In this case, the ALL filter can be beneficial as it helps in providing a total value, the sum of all the values.

REMOVEFILTERS()

Let’s try to use REMOVEFILTERS in this context and see how the results will vary with this.

 It is observed that when we try to use the REMOVEFILTERS in this context, Power BI doesn’t allow us to use the filter; instead, it provides other options to choose from. This can be explained with the explanation that this filter only removes the filter but doesn’t provide a value.

We hope this blog has provided you with the significant difference between these filters and can be helpful to you in your work.

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