8.2 Sorting, Selection Pane, Mobile Layout, and Accessibility

Quick Answer: Sort a visual from its More options (...) -> Sort axis menu, or click a table/matrix column header. The Selection pane (View tab) manages visual z-order (layering), show/hide, tab order, and grouping. Mobile layout (View -> Mobile layout) is a separate portrait arrangement of the same visuals. Alt text on every meaningful visual plus a logical tab order are the core accessibility requirements. Personalize visuals lets consumers temporarily restyle visuals without edit rights.

Sorting visuals

Basic and cross-field sorting

Click More options (...) -> Sort axis -> [field] -> Sort ascending/descending. For tables and matrices, click a column header to toggle direction. You can also sort by a field that is not displayed: add it to the visual's wells, sort by it, then remove it from view — useful when the display label is text but you want to sort by an underlying numeric or date key.

A related modeling technique is Sort by Column (Column tools -> Sort by column), which fixes the order of a categorical column model-wide — the canonical example is sorting a Month Name column by a Month Number column so charts read Jan, Feb, Mar instead of alphabetically.

Top N filtering

In the Filters pane, set a visual-level filter's Filter type = Top N, choose Top or Bottom, enter N, and drag a measure into By value. Example: Top 10 Products by Revenue. Top N is evaluated in the current filter context, so a region slicer changes which 10 products appear.

Selection pane

Open View tab -> Selection. It is the control center for layered and accessible pages.

Tab order is the accessibility half of this pane: switch to the Tab order tab, drag visuals into a logical reading sequence, and remove decorative visuals from the order so keyboard users aren't forced to tab through them.

Mobile layout

View -> Mobile layout opens a phone-shaped portrait canvas. You drag the existing desktop visuals onto it and arrange them independently — you are not creating new visuals, just a second layout of the same ones. Best practices: lead with KPI cards, show fewer visuals than the desktop page, use finger-friendly slicers and buttons, avoid wide many-column tables, and verify in the Power BI Mobile app. If you add no mobile layout, the phone app simply scales the desktop page, which is usually unreadable.

Accessibility

Power BI reports must work for keyboard and screen-reader users. The core requirements:

Good alt text: "Bar chart of 2026 quarterly revenue. Q1 $2.4M, Q2 $3.1M, Q3 $2.8M, Q4 $3.5M; up 46% from Q1 to Q4." Bad: "Chart". Alt text can be dynamic by binding it to a measure (conditional formatting -> Alt text -> fx), so it updates with filter context:

Revenue Alt Text =
"Revenue chart showing " & FORMAT(SUM(Sales[Amount]), "$#,##0") &
" total for " & SELECTEDVALUE('Date'[Year], "all years")

Power BI also ships a built-in high-contrast detection that picks up Windows high-contrast mode, and supports full keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+arrow to move focus, Tab to enter a visual).

Report personalization

Enable File -> Options -> Current file -> Report settings -> "Personalize visuals". Consumers then see a personalize icon and can temporarily change the visual type, add/remove fields, change aggregation, and re-sort — then save the result as a personal bookmark. Changes are per-user and temporary; they never alter the published report for anyone else. Authors can allow or block personalization per visual.

Grouping and the show/hide toggle pattern

The Selection pane's Group and Visibility features combine into the most common interactivity pattern on the exam. Suppose you want a single page that toggles between a chart view and a table view. Place the chart and table on top of each other, group each one (so future visuals you add to a view move with it), then in the Selection pane hide the table and create a bookmark "Chart view"; hide the chart, show the table, create "Table view"; finally add two buttons mapped to those bookmarks. The Selection pane is what makes the hidden visual reappear cleanly — deleting and re-adding visuals would lose their formatting.

Accessibility: the full checklist Microsoft tests

Power BI's accessibility guidance (which the PL-300 draws from) covers more than alt text. Themes: ship a high-contrast-friendly theme and avoid color combinations that fail for color-blind users (red/green together). Markers: in line and scatter charts, turn on markers so series are distinguishable without color. Tab order: set it deliberately so a screen-reader user hears KPIs first, then detail. Title and labels: every visual needs a clear title; rely on data labels rather than only a legend. Tooltips: keyboard users can open them, so keep them informative.

Built-in checks: the report's Show table / keyboard accessible data view (Alt+Shift+F11) exposes a visual's data as a navigable table for screen readers. None of this requires Premium — accessibility is a Desktop authoring discipline.

Personalization vs. editing — the boundary

A frequent distractor pairs personalization with model editing. Personalize visuals never touches the data model: a consumer can swap a bar chart for a line chart and add a field that already exists in the model, but they cannot add new measures, change relationships, or alter source data. Their changes are stored as a personal bookmark scoped to them; other users and the published report are unaffected. Contrast this with a Contributor/Member opening the report in edit mode, whose changes do alter the shared report. Authors enable personalization per report (Report settings) and can disable it for specific visuals.

On the exam

Expect questions that map a goal to the Selection pane (overlapping visuals -> layer order; keyboard order -> tab order; show/hide -> visibility + bookmarks), require alt text + tab order + markers for screen-reader accessibility, ask what personalization can and cannot do (temporary, per-user, no data-model edits), and test Sort by Column for fixing month ordering.