Interactivity & navigation
How people move around the chart and how it talks to the rest of your report.
The top bar
Every Org Chart has a compact bar across the top with three controls, packed to the left so they never collide with Power BI's own header icons (pin, filter, focus mode).
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Search box | Find any card, including ones inside collapsed branches. |
| Rotate button | Switch between Top-Down and Left-to-Right. |
| Levels menu | Set how many levels are visible, expand all, or reset the view. |
The zoom controls float separately at the bottom-right of the canvas.
Search
Type in the search box to find cards anywhere in the hierarchy — including inside collapsed branches.
Search matches, case-insensitively, against:
- the card's Entity ID
- every Information Field value
- the Swimlane value
- every Tooltip field value
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Ctrl+F / Cmd+F | Jump to the search box |
| ↑ / ↓ | Move through the results list |
| Enter | Go to the highlighted result |
| Escape | Clear the search and close the results |
Selecting a result expands whatever ancestors were collapsed to reveal the card, then zooms to it and highlights it.
Because search reaches into collapsed branches, the fastest way to navigate a large chart is to leave it collapsed to 2–3 levels and search for the person or cost centre you want.
Zoom, pan and fit
| Action | How |
|---|---|
| Zoom in / out | The + and − buttons, or the mouse wheel over the canvas |
| Pan | Drag any empty part of the canvas |
| Fit to screen | The ⛶ button |
| Current zoom | Shown as a percentage between the buttons |
Zoom ranges from 10% to 500%.
The chart re-fits itself automatically when the hierarchy's shape changes — a level change from the levels menu, a focus action, a data refresh that alters the tree. A single expand or collapse deliberately keeps your zoom and pan and anchors the card you clicked, so the view doesn't jump.
Cross-filtering the report
Clicking a card selects it and cross-filters every other visual on the page.
| Action | Result |
|---|---|
| Click a card | Select it and filter the report |
| Ctrl+click / Cmd+click a card | Add or remove a card from the selection |
| Click empty canvas | Clear the selection |
| Click a legend item | Select every card with that KPI status |
| Ctrl+click a legend item | Add another status to the selection |
When KPI Period is bound, a card represents several rows — one per period. Clicking it selects all of them, so downstream visuals receive the card's whole history, not just its latest period.
Being filtered by other visuals
The Org Chart does not dim in response to cross-filtering from other visuals — filtered-out rows are removed entirely, so the tree redraws with only the cards that survive the filter.
This is usually what you want (a slicer on Department redraws the chart as that department's sub-tree), but it means the chart can change shape when other visuals are clicked. Cards whose parents were filtered away become top-level cards rather than disappearing.
If you'd rather the chart stay put, turn off the interaction: select the other visual, then Format → Edit interactions, and set the Org Chart to None.
Right-click menu
Right-clicking a card opens Power BI's standard context menu for that data point — Drill through, Include / Exclude, Show as a table, Copy, and any report-page drill-through targets you've defined.
Drill-through pairs particularly well with an org chart: right-click a manager's card to open a detail page filtered to that person or cost centre. Set the target page's drill-through field to whatever you bound to Entity ID.
Tooltips
Hovering a card shows a tooltip containing the Entity ID, your Tooltips fields, the KPI, the comparison base (target or previous period), and the comparison result. See Data fields → Tooltips for the exact order.
Turn them off entirely with Format → Tooltips.
Report page tooltips
The visual supports report-page tooltips: build a tooltip page, then set it as the tooltip for the Org Chart under Format → Tooltips in Power BI's own settings. Hovering a card renders that whole page, filtered to the card — a mini profile with a photo, a trend chart, and a table, for example.
Bookmarks
The chart's expand/collapse state and its orientation are stored with the report, which means bookmarks capture them. You can build a set of bookmarks that each open the chart at a different depth, orientation, or focused branch, and wire them to buttons.
Pair a bookmark with the Reset view menu item: set your preferred depth in Format → Display, and every viewer's "reset" returns to the same shared starting point.
Keyboard and accessibility
The Org Chart is fully keyboard-operable and reports itself to screen readers.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Tab | Move between the top-bar controls, the zoom controls, the legend and the cards |
| Enter / Space | Select the focused card (cross-filters the report) |
| Ctrl+Enter | Add the focused card to the selection |
| → | Expand the focused card |
| ← | Collapse the focused card |
| Shift+→ / Shift+← | Expand / collapse the focused card's whole branch |
| Shift+Enter | Focus on the branch (the keyboard equivalent of double-click) |
| Alt+Enter | Open the card's Card URL |
| Ctrl+F / Cmd+F | Jump to the search box |
| Escape | Close the search results or the levels menu |
Card focus follows the on-screen order of the chart, including stacked cards. In a right-to-left layout, ← and → swap, so the key pointing towards a card's children always expands it.
Each card announces itself as a single item, with its title, its KPI and value, the comparison result and its status word, and — when collapsed — how many children are hidden. The KPI status icons are decorative to screen readers; the status word is spoken instead.
High-contrast mode is respected automatically: the chart switches to Power BI's system colour palette, and cards, pills and swimlane bands gain outlines. Because KPI status is encoded by icon shape as well as colour, it survives the switch.
Focus mode and export
- Focus mode (Power BI's expand icon) enlarges the visual; the chart re-fits to the larger area.
- Export to PowerPoint and PDF and email subscriptions render the chart correctly, because the visual is Microsoft-certified.
- Export data from the visual's menu returns the underlying rows.
Related
- Hierarchy & layout — expand/collapse, focus and the levels menu in detail.
- KPIs, targets & trends — the legend as a status filter.
- Use cases — worked examples that combine these.