Using the Page navigator

So far, we have seen how to navigate between pages using drill through, weave through a report with bookmarks, and see additional details using tooltips. Now, let’s explore how you can enhance the most common and basic method for navigating a report: pages. In Power BI Desktop the pages display line the bottom of the report canvas. In the Power BI service pages are displayed in a list on the left side of the screen. What if a user’s eyes never had to leave the report canvas? They could focus on the report, navigation to the relevant pages would be on each page, and in the case of Power BI Desktop, there would be no hidden pages to confuse the user. Of course this can be accomplished using buttons, but the same issue arises that we saw with bookmarks earlier int his chapter. Creating additional pages means a lot of manual work to keep things updated and organized. This is where the page navigator comes into the picture.

The page navigator operates...

Summary

Being able to use the features discussed in this chapter effectively will turn interactive reports into dynamic digital storytelling tools. Report developers have a wide variety of tools at their disposal to tell exciting stories from using space more efficiently by creating toggles, empowering users to drill through to gain detail level insights, adding value by enhancing the built-in tooltips, or calling out important views with bookmarks. In the next chapter, you will see how to take this completed Power BI report and share it with others.

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In the previous chapter, you learned how to explore many of the readily available visuals within Power BI and saw how they can showcase your data. With the assistance of cross-highlighting and cross-filtering, you can also make the visuals work with each other. But there is so much more than just simple drag-and-drop reporting within Power BI. Power BI has several useful storytelling features. Alongside the different visuals, Power BI has a set of features that can tie together not only individual charts and graphs, but that can also allow users to navigate through multiple pages to discover...

Configuring drill through

In Chapter 6, Visualizing Data, you saw the power of filtering to allow a single visual to provide many different views of the data. For instance, a Bar chart showing all sales could also show sales by year if cross-filtered by a date Slicer. You also saw how the filter pane could be applied to visuals on a single page or across the entire report. Up to this point, those were the only two options available. The Drill through feature allows users to navigate from one report visual to another report page while maintaining the filter context of the visual. A common example of the use of Drill through is going from a summary to a detail page. A summary page may contain several visualizations for sales data all aggregated at the country level. One of those could be a Pie chart showing total sales broken down by country. While this can be useful, many users will want access to more detailed information, such as all the sales that happened in a particular country. A...

Capturing report views with bookmarks

Cross-filtering, cross-highlighting, and Drill through filters make a big impact on how users consume the data in Power BI reports. Sometimes, though, you may want to ensure that users see the data in a very specific way that will truly show its impact, satisfy report requirements, or simply provide alternate views of the data.

You can guide report consumers in a very interactive way using Bookmarks and showing or hiding visualizations in the Selection pane. Using these options, you can make better use of the available canvas on each report page and still make it feel as if users have many choices as to how they will view the data.

The Bookmarks feature allows report creators to capture the view of a Report page. Bookmarks will save the current state of all filters, slicers, in-focus items, sorting, and spotlight visuals (more on that feature later in this section) on a page at the time when the bookmark is created. This allows users to return to...

Combining object visibility with bookmarks

The Selection pane provides a list of all objects on the current page and allows you to show or hide visuals. This is useful if a slicer or visual is needed for cross-filtering but is not needed for analysis. It is also useful to reuse the same Report page for the same data but using different visuals when you are pressed for space. The following section will demonstrate how to maximize your use of space when visualizing data in different ways.

Bookmarking alternate views of the same data

Some users may want to see sales by country as a Bar chart, and others may want to see it as a Table. If there is not enough room for both visuals, the default answer may be to create a new page. However, it can be cumbersome to recreate and maintain the same exact filters on multiple pages. An alternate solution would be to put both visuals on the same page and dynamically show or hide them based on a user selection of "chart" or "table."...

Report pages as tooltips

Tooltips are another useful feature that allows a user to see precise information about a piece of a visual while moving the mouse around the Report canvas. While the formatting options discussed in the previous chapter can display value labels on a visual, sometimes that can cause a report to become too cluttered or a visual may just be too small to display a label. Tooltips solve this problem by allowing a user to see the label information for only the slide of data they care about. But what if those tooltips could display even more information and provide even greater insight? Thankfully, Power BI comes through on this front by allowing you to specify a report page as a tooltip for a visual.

Power BI includes a few different important options for tooltip visuals. First, to use a visual for a tooltip, you must create a report page and set the property for Allow use as tooltip to On, which is found in the Format section, then Page Information settings. Next,...

Using the Page navigator

So far, we have seen how to navigate between pages using drill through, weave through a report with bookmarks, and see additional details using tooltips. Now, let’s explore how you can enhance the most common and basic method for navigating a report: pages. In Power BI Desktop the pages display line the bottom of the report canvas. In the Power BI service pages are displayed in a list on the left side of the screen. What if a user’s eyes never had to leave the report canvas? They could focus on the report, navigation to the relevant pages would be on each page, and in the case of Power BI Desktop, there would be no hidden pages to confuse the user. Of course this can be accomplished using buttons, but the same issue arises that we saw with bookmarks earlier int his chapter. Creating additional pages means a lot of manual work to keep things updated and organized. This is where the page navigator comes into the picture.

The page navigator operates...

Summary

Being able to use the features discussed in this chapter effectively will turn interactive reports into dynamic digital storytelling tools. Report developers have a wide variety of tools at their disposal to tell exciting stories from using space more efficiently by creating toggles, empowering users to drill through to gain detail level insights, adding value by enhancing the built-in tooltips, or calling out important views with bookmarks. In the next chapter, you will see how to take this completed Power BI report and share it with others.