This is the first in a short series calling out some great features available in Power BI which I have demonstrated on my Norwegian Population report. If you’re starting out, I think these features are worth a look as they are flexible and powerful enabling you to create richer reports. First up – bookmarks.

What are bookmarks?

Bookmarks are a saved state of a report page which can be activated by a button press from the user. In this report, I made it so the user can toggle between seeing the data as a table or a map, meaning I can expand the use of the report page by hiding/showing different elements.

Bookmarks can also be used to build a filter popup pane. I’ve used this technique myself and feel it gives a really nice user experience. Be aware though that you’ll need to do this on each page you want a popup pane, which can be cumbersome if you have many reports. Bookmarks were also the primary way to build in page navigation to reports before the Page Navigation action was released.

How?

Here’s how to implement the show/hide visuals toggle. First, create your two visuals and add two buttons to the report. I tend to put these side by side so I can see everything.

Open the Selection Pane and Bookmarks from the View tab. Add a bookmark and rename it – here I call my bookmarks ‘Show table’ and ‘Show map’.

Next, the bookmarks need configuring. By clicking the eye icon (yellow below), I can hide the ‘Show table’ and ‘Fylke map’ visual. This is how I want my page to look when a user clicks the ‘Show table’ button.

I can then go ahead and save this state into the ‘Show table’ bookmark. Click the three dots next to the bookmark name, and adjust the options to those below before hitting Update. It’s possible to make your bookmarks only effect certain visuals, navigate across pages, and to save the filtered state of a visual – here however, we just want to remember whether the visuals are displayed not.

Now the ‘Show table’ bookmark is configured. Repeat the same steps for the ‘Show map’ bookmark, which should look like this:

You can test that these states have been saved by clicking the two bookmarks, which should now toggle between the two views.

Once you’re happy, you need to assign the bookmarks to each of the two buttons on the canvas. Click the ‘Show table’ button, and under Action, select the bookmark you want to trigger.

Repeat for the ‘Show map’ button. Now the buttons are all in place.

The final step is to layer the buttons and visuals on top of one another. This means that when the visuals are toggled between, the new visual and button pops up in the same place, making the user experience seemless. It’s a good idea to use the X/Y co-ordinates so you can them exactly aligned. And that’s it!