Using drillthrough and cross-filter – Enhancing Reports

Using drillthrough and cross-filter

When creating reports, you may want to have a page of summary information and then pages with more detailed information for specific categories or subsets of data. In these cases, you can use the drillthrough feature to start viewing a report page at a wider and more general level and then drill into the detail on another page. For example, if you start at a report page that shows rolled-up sales data for all product categories, you can select a specific product or category of products and use drillthrough to navigate to a product page that is filtered to the selected product or category of products. Using this capability, you wouldn’t need to design specific report pages for each product or product category, because each time, a potentially unique product filter would be applied per the selection of the user.

Figure 11.23 – Drillthrough allows you to navigate from one visual to another page

To create a drillthrough, you first create a report page. Then, from the Values section of the Visualizations pane, drag the field for which you want to enable drillthrough in the drillthrough filters as well.

You have the option of keeping all the filters from the source page, which is any slicer, filter, and cross-filter or cross-highlights selected, or only filtering the page on the selected category.

When a drillthrough is added to a report, Power BI will automatically add a back button to the report page. This is used for navigation but is fully editable by the report designer.

The cross-report drillthrough option is outside the scope of this exam, but you can use it to direct your report consumers to an entirely different report instead of just another page in the current report.

Drilling down into data using interactive visuals

Drilldown and drill up are totally unrelated to drillthrough. Drilldown relates to hierarchal visualizations, such as matrixes. If you have added a hierarchy to a matrix, you can go to the next level of the hierarchy or you can expand the entire level. You also have the option to have + and – signs to expand a single element while leaving the rest of the elements at their current level.

Figure 11.24 – The icons that let you navigate a hierarchy

Drill up and drilldown allow your report consumers to see summarized data and then the underlying data, if necessary.

Figure 11.25 – Expanding a hierarchy with either the +/- or the drill up/drilldown buttons

You may be familiar with these behaviors from Excel.