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Before you start
Two things worth knowing before you dig in:
The filters panel. There's a collapsible filters panel on the right-hand side of your file. As you make selections, they'll appear here. It's a useful way to keep track of what you've applied and clear things back if needed.
The visual hover menu. Hovering over any visual brings up a small menu with additional options. Most of the features in this article live there.
Step 1: Sort your data to find the story
Rather than reading through everything, use sorting to surface what matters quickly.
On any bar chart visual, hover to bring up the menu and select Sort by. You can sort ascending or descending by your chosen KPI (for example, sentiment), which immediately puts your lowest or highest performing categories front and centre.
On the Customised Comparison page there's an additional sort option: Sort by difference. This reorders your bars so the categories with the biggest change between your two time periods appear first. It's a quick way to spot where things have moved most without doing the mental arithmetic yourself.
Step 2: Drill down through the levels
Once you've spotted something interesting at a category level, you can drill into it.
Hover over your visual and use the drill down controls to move to the next level in the hierarchy. This will expand to show all themes across your whole project.
If you want to focus on a specific category, click on it first to highlight it, then drill down. Your visual will update to show only the themes within that category.
From theme level, you can go further. Right-click on a theme and select Drill through > Verbatim to jump straight to the individual comments sitting behind that selection, with your filters carried through automatically.
Step 3: Filter by clicking
You don't need to use the filters panel for everything. Clicking directly on a category, theme, or segment in any visual will filter your whole page to match that selection.
To select multiple items at once, hold Shift or Ctrl while clicking. This is particularly useful for sentiment segments. If you want to look at all negative feedback together, hold Shift and select both the negative and very negative bars. Your page will update to show only comments in those sentiment ranges.
You can stack selections across multiple visuals to build up a precise view. For example: a category, a sentiment range, and a specific theme, all held together at once.
Step 4: Drill into time
If your data has a time hierarchy (quarters, months, weeks, days), you can use the drill controls on any line graph to move between levels of detail.
Start at year level and drill down to see quarters, then months, then individual days if needed. This makes it easier to spot whether a change is a trend or a one-off, and to match your view to whatever reporting period you're working to.
Step 5: Sort and tidy tables
On any table in your file, click a column header to re-sort by that value. Clicking the same header again reverses the order. This is handy when you want to quickly see which themes have changed most in volume or sentiment.
If you want to remove certain themes from view (for a screenshot or a presentation), select them, right-click, and choose Exclude. They'll disappear from the visual until you remove the filter or refresh the file.
You can also resize column widths by clicking and dragging the column headers, which is useful for making a table more compact before screenshotting it.
Step 6: Export and share
A few options for getting your data out:
Spotlight. Hover over a visual, open the menu, and select Spotlight. Everything else on the page dims, drawing attention to that single visual. Click anywhere to turn it off. Useful when presenting live.
Focus mode. Expands a single visual to fill the screen. Good for screenshots or for reading specific numbers more clearly.
Copy image with caption. Copies the visual to your clipboard, ready to paste into an email, presentation, or Teams message. It includes an auto-generated caption showing the filters applied and the date of the data.
Export data. Available on any visual. Exports the underlying data as an Excel or CSV file. Particularly useful for verbatim, where copying and pasting directly from Power BI can be fiddly. Exporting gives you a clean file of the comments to work with or share.
We covered all of this in a Nerd Club session and the recording is available on the Nerd Club page. Video walkthroughs for each page of your Power BI file are also available in Nerd Academy under the Power BI page.
✍️ Article written by: Katie, Customer Success Manager
Still in need of some help? Give us an email on support@wordnerds.ai or reach out to your CSM directly.