Global Search — PowerBI Slicer.

One search field, for the whole report.

Documentation

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The problem

Someone from sales calls you: find invoice 45821. You already know what's coming. You open the report, look at the row of slicers, and start the ritual: is it in Invoice? In Document? In Reference? Click one, type, nothing. Click another, type, nothing. On the third one it shows up.

Thirty seconds lost by you, who knows the model by heart. Now imagine the regional manager who opens that same report once a week and has no idea where anything lives.

Power BI never solved this. The native slicer searches one column, and that's it. The filter pane, too. Which means whoever uses the report needs to know the model's structure to find anything at all. That's a lot to ask from someone who just wants to see a number.

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The workarounds people try

Everyone who works with Power BI has tried to get around this. It's worth recognizing the effort behind each path, and where each one gets stuck.

Stacking slicers with search. One per column, all with the search field turned on. Works with two or three. On the fourth, the canvas becomes a wall of boxes and the user still has to pick the right box before typing.

Field Parameters with DAX and bookmarks. The elegant solution on paper: a parameter with the searchable columns, dynamic filtering measures, one slicer to choose the field, another for the value, bookmarks tying it all together. You spend an afternoon building it. Then someone renames a table and the measures break. And in the end, the user still has to choose the field before typing, which is exactly the problem we wanted to kill.

Unpivot in Power Query. Dumps everything into an attribute-value table and searches a single column. It solves the search and charges dearly for it: the model denormalizes, the row count multiplies, relationships need to be rebuilt, and measures that depend on the original granularity stop adding up. Trading model integrity for a search field isn't a good deal.

Q&A. Depends on manually configured synonyms, behaves unpredictably in non-English languages, and gives you no control over where it looks. Hard to defend in a corporate environment.

None of these is a bad choice by whoever made it. They're all workarounds for a gap the product left open.

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How it works in practice

Global Search is a search field you drag onto the canvas and connect to whichever columns make sense to search — customer, product, invoice, SKU, sales rep, whatever. Up to 25 of them.

The user types 45821. A dropdown appears showing where that value exists, grouped by field: Invoice (3 of 12), Document (1 of 1). They click, the filter is applied, and the whole page reacts.

No choosing a field first. No knowing where the data lives. Type and find it.

Usage example

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And what it does well

• It narrows down together with you. Filtered São Paulo? From there on, the Product and Sales Rep suggestions only show what exists within São Paulo. The search follows the context instead of ignoring what you've already filtered.

• You see what's filtered. Every active filter becomes a tag below the field, with the source field's name if you want. Two or more values from the same field group into a tag like Customer (4), and clicking it opens the list to remove them one by one. No discovering half an hour later that a filter got left on.

• Batch selection. Every dropdown group has a Select all. Need the 12 customers that match the term? One click. Or hold Ctrl and keep clicking, since the dropdown stays open.

• Forgives typing. cafe finds café, because accent normalization is on by default. Upper and lower case, by default, don't matter. And you choose whether the search is by contains, starts with, or equals.

• Tells you what can be searched. With several fields connected, the placeholder cycles through their names every 2.5 seconds. The user figures out on their own what they can search for, no training needed.

• Matches the look of your report. Five ready-made themes — Black & White, Red, Blue, Mustard, Green — applied with a single click, and then every color, font, border, and height adjustable in the formatting pane. No settling for the visual it came with.

• Works with the keyboard. Tab, Enter, Esc. One Esc closes the dropdown, the second clears all filters. With ARIA on every interactive element, so a screen reader handles it too.

• Speaks the user's language. Portuguese, English, and Spanish, auto-detected or fixed in the pane. Interface and formatting pane, both.

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It doesn't touch your model

This matters more than it seems, so it's worth saying clearly: Global Search doesn't require DAX, doesn't require a calculated column, doesn't require unpivoting, doesn't require anything in Power Query.

It applies the filter through Power BI's native mechanism. Which means the filter propagates through the relationships like any other, respects RLS, and affects every visual on the page. No parallel behavior you'll have to explain later.

One detail I fixed because it bothered me: Power BI freezes the table's name the moment you connect the field. If someone renames the table afterward, visual filters usually stop working silently — the worst kind of bug. Global Search rereads the column's real reference on every refresh, notices the rename, and reapplies the correct filter. You never even find out it happened, and that's exactly the point.

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Performance and limits

Everything runs on the machine of whoever is using the report, with no external calls — holds equally true on Desktop and on the Service. Values are indexed as the data arrives, and filtering is immediate as you type.

It loads up to 50 thousand rows per refresh. If your dataset is larger, a Load more prompt appears to bring in the next batch. It supports up to 10 simultaneous filters across different columns, with text, number, or date fields.

The recommendation, if you have volume: connect the dimension tables, not the fact table. Unique values, far fewer rows, and the filter propagates on its own through the relationship.

There's also a diagnostic indicator in the dropdown's header — something like 0.7ms · 1288L · 17R, meaning search time, indexed rows, and results found. Useful while you develop, and can be turned off when you deliver.

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Comparing with what's out there

Information about third-party visuals based on public documentation from AppSource and vendors. Subject to change with new versions.

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No telemetry, for real

The visual makes no network calls at all. No third-party SDK, no analytics, no telemetry. Your data never leaves the report's environment because there's nowhere for it to go.

This isn't a marketing stance, it's a consequence of the design: everything happens on the client, with Power BI's own API. If you work in a regulated environment, it's an argument that holds up under security review.

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Is it worth installing?

Global Search doesn't replace a well-structured data model. It solves an experience problem: it offers a single place to search for values across several columns of the report, without the user needing to understand how the model was built.

It's free, with no restrictions, no data collection, and it's on AppSource ready to drag into your next report.

If it saves you that thirty-second search a few times a week, or earned you a good deal of space in your template, it was already worth it! And if it was, leave a positive review on AppSource 😁