Top N Filter Top n filter is available on the filters pane and it's a great way to limit the amount of values that appear on our chart. One of the ways we can do this is by specifying the top 10, top 5, bottom 10, bottom five to see the most popular values on our chart. It makes it much easier to analyze the results.

So for example, if we want to see the total amount spent by each client or customer and we have a lot of customers, then our column chart or our bar chart is going to appear with too many values to really make sense of it.

If we use a top-end filter on that visual, then we can narrow it down to only showing the top five clients. So who's spent the most money? It's a really useful way to make the chart easier to understand and updates when the data is refreshed. If we have another customer who then spends a lot more money, they may rise to the top and the chart will update we can use on tables bar charts and column charts.

Let's do a workout and see how to use a top-end filter in Power BI.

I use get data to connect to an Excel workbook, I'm taking module 5 lesson 2B.

I'm going to select a worksheet here, so if I take the credit transactions worksheet, I load it straight into my report.

And the first thing we'll do is create a bar chart which will show us here the total amount for each of our customers. It's like the amount fields and select the customer name and I'll turn it into a clustered bar chart here. So let's just make a little bit bigger and bring it onto the pane. We can see already we have way too many customers to really make sense of this chart, so we have to scroll down to even get to the bottom of the list there.

It would make much more sense and be much more interesting if I could just look at who the top 5 customers were for example.

So what I'm going to do is use the filter pane to set that filter up keeping my chart selected, I'll make sure the filter pane is expanded.

And it's a filter on just this visual, so if I do have any other visuals on the page, it won't apply to them.

I already have two fields in here. These are the fields that the chart itself is using and I want to use one of those fields customer name to set up the filter. I'm just going to expand it here, it's not a basic filter. It's a different type, so if I go into this list here, I can change it to top and and I can specify how many I want 5 10 whatever number I can even change it if I wish to the bottom as well, so I'll keep it at top and I'll set it to top five.

Now, the important thing to remember here is it will work out for me who the top five customers are but I need to tell it which field it is going to base that on. It's based on the amount how much they've spent so I will drag the amount field in to the bi-value. There we go, and it needs me to apply the filter. So I click on that and we can see the chart has an eye updated to show me my top five customers.