1. Create and display bookmarks
In this demo, we will walk through all the various ways you can create a fluid navigation experience for users in Power BI.
First, let's open the Bookmarks pane. We can get to this pane through the View ribbon menu.
On the bookmarks pane, we can see two buttons: add bookmarks and View bookmarks. Because we don't have any bookmarks yet, the View button is grayed out. Let's create one now by clicking Add. Using the ellipsis next to the bookmark, we can rename it to Overview. This keeps track of our current page and most filters or display options we have set.
Next, let's drill down into one of these restaurants, right-clicking and selecting Drill through to the Inspection Report. On the Inspection Report page, I want to add a card at the top and put in the restaurant name. I will also navigate the Format menu and turn off the Category label.
Let's tidy this up a bit so that the title is at the top and does not overlap with anything else. Now we will add a new bookmark and call it Restaurant.
Finally, we will return to the Overview page, select Lauren Harden as the inspector, drag the number of inspections scatter chart to 201904, and add a bookmark called Lauren 2019.
If we select View from the Bookmarks pane, we can see each bookmark in order, starting with the Overview. The bottom of the page includes a navigation menu, complete with arrow indicators to move back and forth between bookmarks. When navigating to bookmarks, we still have the ability to interact with report elements, so this is still a live report.
One interesting thing to note is that the scatter chart does not reset to a specific date, even though we set it before adding the bookmark. Filters will still work as expected, but we cannot prime the play axis by setting a bookmark.
We can exit the bookmark navigator by selecting the X at the bottom of the screen or selecting Exit from the Bookmarks pane.
Now let's add a couple of buttons to the page. You can find buttons on the Insert menu. Selecting Buttons shows a set of button icons. Let's pick the right arrow button. I'll move the bar chart down, so we have room at the top and drag the button over.
To update the button text, we'll need to go to Style in the format pane and toggle the text to "on". There we can add the text "Go to Inspection Report."
In the Icon menu, we can change the shape if we desire. To define action, we need to open the Action menu, enable actions, and choose a type. I'll select "Drill through" from the drop-down list and then Inspection Report from the list of destinations. Doing so disables the inspection report button.
To re-enable the button, we need to select a restaurant. Doing so shows that the inspection report button is now enabled.
If we deployed this report to the Power BI Online service, users could click an inspection and then click the button to go to the report. In Power BI desktop, we need to hold down the Control key when clicking to go to the report.
Let's navigate back to the Overview bookmark to reset the filters on this page.
Next, let's add another button to the screen, a bookmark button that we will place under the other. We'll type "Lauren" for the button text.
Then, in the Action menu, we can see that it is already enabled and set to the Bookmark type. Let's change the bookmark in the menu to Lauren 2019. When we control-click the Lauren button, it will display the page like we had it set up with the Lauren 2019 bookmark. This is a handy way of providing users the ability to move between bookmarks in the UI without needing to open a separate bookmarks pane.
Finally, the last step we'll show you at a high level is the navigator option in Power BI which can be useful in a number of scenarios. First, you'll navigate to the Buttons menu under Insert. You'll then select Navigator, which will provide two further options - page and bookmark Navigator. For this, we'll use page navigator, which has created a new navigation containing a list of all the pages in our report.
Now, let's apply what we've seen here and apply it in the following exercises.
2. Let's practice!