When former Qlik customers migrate their old solutions to Power BI, I see the same UX pattern almost every time: make it look as much like Qlik as possible. This translates to slicers instead of the filter pane and a hacked-together object displaying the current selections, standing in for the selection bar in Qlik Sense or the current selections object in QlikView.
I'm strongly against this for a variety of reasons. Here's the briefest one: it looks like a current selections object in Qlik, but it isn't interactive or comprehensive like the one in Qlik, where you can clear and modify selections right from it, and it always include all current selections (except hidden fields). Building it with DAX means writing a measure that manually accounts for
every column that could possibly be selected and the calculation
overhead associated with that. That list varies by page
and has to be kept in sync with the slicers on that page, forever. And
it doesn't account for cross-filtering or cross-highlighting, so
the moment a user clicks a bar in a chart, the "current selections"
object is silently incorrect.
Making something look like a familiar feature without behaving like one is confusing and inevitably disappointing. The first thing a user thinks is "Is this broken?" and the negative comparisons begin. (Really, the Power BI feature most similar is the filter pane, which also happens to require the least development effort and is fully interactive, enabling you to clear or change selections and even work from a very long, searchable list of possible filters.)
I had an idea the other day that mitigates some of the downside of rebuilding the object. I wrote earlier about using a narrative visual for on-demand language translation. So why not see whether the narrative visual could be "trained" to report the current filters instead?
Add a narrative visual, choose Copilot as the visual type, then give it a prompt. Here's the one I used:
List every filter, slicer selection, and cross-filter currently applied to this page. Do not summarize the data. Output only the filter state as field/value pairs. Put the values in bold. If more than 3 distinct values are selected in a single field, write "x of y selected" instead of listing the values. If nothing is filtered, output "No selections". Don't use single quotes around the column names.
The output looks pretty good, works on any page, needs no maintenance, and even includes crossfilters.
The two big downsides: 1) you have to click refresh to update it each time you change the selections, and 2) invoking Copilot every time will burn more CUs than a DAX measure would. It also lacks the interactivity of the real Qlik object, but so does the DAX version. Those are pretty big downsides, though.
Which brings me back to where I started. There's an option with no DAX, no maintenance, no CUs, and it's always up to date. This is merely a prototype, but it looks like this:
