Why doesn't my Power BI filter selection appear on the screen?
When you select filters in the Power BI preview inside PLAYipp Manager, those selections don't carry over to what's shown on the screen. This article explains why, and how to display the filtered view you want.
Table of contents
PLAYipp displays Power BI reports and dashboards in their default state, the same state the report opens in when you browse to it directly in Power BI Service.
When you interact with filters in the PLAYipp Manager preview, you are interacting with a live Power BI session running in your browser. That filter state lives only in your browser session and is not saved as part of the source PLAYipp uses to display the content.
This applies regardless of which display mode you use:
- Embed (live): the report is loaded fresh in the player's browser when rendered on screen, with default filters applied.
- Screenshot mode: PLAYipp's server loads the report and captures an image, also with default filters applied.
A media player has no mouse or touch input, so even if filter selections could be passed through, no one could change them on screen.
The filter must be applied in Power BI before the report reaches PLAYipp. There are two practical approaches.
Option 1: Multiple pages in one report (recommended)
In Power BI Desktop, duplicate the report page once for each view you want to display. For each copy, apply the desired filters (for example, year = 2024 on one page, 2025 on another, 2026 on a third) and publish.
Each page becomes a separate selectable source in PLAYipp. You can then:
- Add them to the same playlist to rotate between views, or
- Place them in different layout areas to display side by side.
Option 2: Multiple separate reports
Same principle, but each filtered view is published as its own report. This involves more overhead to maintain, but is useful if access permissions differ between views.
- Match the canvas size in Power BI to the resolution of the area you are publishing to. This avoids unwanted scaling on screen.
- Set the desired filter values as the default state on each page. Do not rely on slicer interactions, since no one can interact with the screen.
- The original full report with slicers remains available in Power BI Service for interactive analysis on a laptop or in meeting rooms. Only the screen-displayed version needs to be pre-filtered.