Using bookmarks – Enhancing Reports

Using bookmarks

Power BI installs with many visuals you can use to tell your data story. These visuals allow you to highlight the data you want in order to explain insights you have discovered in your data that lead to actions your business can take. Bookmarks allow you to save the page as it is being viewed. By saving the page, potentially with cross-visual filtering, using bookmarks allows you to step through views of the report in a slide-like fashion to aid in telling a story with the data.

When you add a bookmark, you save the following:

  • Current page
  • Filters
  • Slicers, including slicer type (for example, dropdown or list) and slicer state
  • Cross-highlight filter state
  • Sort order
  • Drill-up/drill-down level
  • Visibility of an object (by using the Selection pane)
  • Focus
  • Spotlight

The actual data on the report page is not saved, just the state of the visuals. This means that when the data is refreshed, the new data will be displayed, but with the same filters, slicers, visibility, and so forth.

To add a bookmark, first get the report page in the state you want to save it in, then select Bookmarks from the View tab. This will open the Bookmarks panel.

Figure 11.1 – The Bookmarks panel can be opened from the View ribbon

In the Bookmarks panel, you click on the Add button to save your current page in its current configuration. After adding the bookmark, you change the page’s slicers, cross-filters, or cross-highlights and add a new bookmark to save those choices. You can switch pages and add bookmarks based on various configurations on that page.

Figure 11.2 – Selecting the Add button saves the state of the report page to the Bookmarks panel

You can also rename your bookmarks, reorder them, and group them into sections.

Bookmarks can turn your report into a tool for repeatable presentations, allowing you to control the story, presenting your data in the order that you want it to be presented. Bookmarks will also allow you to freely go off script in your presentation. You can highlight other data points, change slicers, or even skip to a different page, all the while knowing that you can get right back to where you were with the click of a button.

You can also associate a bookmark with a button or an image. This will give your report a feeling of interactivity as your report consumers can click on buttons or images and get taken to a different page or the same page with different slicers and filters selected.

As we will see in the next section, you can use the Selection pane alongside bookmarks to take your report to whole new levels of interactivity.