Bookmarks are one of those tools that I never really understood on day one. I just kept ignoring them thinking they were not that important. What a mistake!
Bookmarks serve multiple purposes in Power BI Reports. Regardless of your skill level or design experience, they can help any creator. The trick is understanding how they work so you can leverage them.
The Basics of Bookmarks
Sometimes the most basic solutions are some of the best. Bookmarks personify that point. The easiest way to showcase the basics of bookmarks is to save a view you like to use.
When digging into a report, I frequently apply different filters and slicers to find insights. I often find something interesting and will want to reference it later. Before bookmarks, I would have to take some notes about how to reproduce what I found. Well, I should take notes but often forget. Sound familiar? Instead of taking all of those notes, just apply a bookmark!
Creating Bookmarks
Last year, I created a property assessment report for my town. I built the tool to check the assessment value of houses in town and compare them. The reason? My property taxes are directly tied to the assessed value of my property. Like most people, I checked out other properties in town.
When I found one that was interesting, the easiest thing for me to do was bookmark what I found. To get started with creating a bookmark, I go to the view ribbon and select the bookmarks panel. Once that is open, I can click the add button to save my view.
With my bookmark created, I can now quickly click on it to restore my view. Mess with any of the settings and then click on the bookmark on the right to restore the saved view.
Updating a Bookmark
Sometimes you want to make an adjustment to a bookmark. Maybe you made a mistake or need to adjust your filters. Instead of deleting or creating a new bookmark, you can simply update it.
I can click the three dots to the right of the bookmark name to pull up a menu. There are a lot of settings in here, but we just need to focus on the update option for now. Just simply select update and your bookmark will be adjusted.
We also can take the time to rename our bookmark in the same place. Just select rename and choose one that makes sense. Use whatever works for you – it has to be better than “Bookmark 1”!
Build a Panel of References
One of my favorite things to use bookmarks for is to build out a list of views. When I am trying to create a seamless presentation, I build out my views and just start clicking through them. Before bookmarks, I could take screenshots and put them in a PowerPoint deck, but I lost the interactivity of the report!
To prepare for my presentation, I build out all of my bookmarks. Once they are created, I can drag and drop them into the right order. When I am ready to present, I open the report and show the bookmark panel. I can step through my presentation and provide quality reporting that contains an interactive component.
Extending Bookmarks for Flexibility
Another common use for bookmarks is to provide a little flexibility with your report canvas. They say you cannot make everyone happy. However, sometimes you can using a few bookmarks.
A common scenario I run into is picky report consumers who have specific report visuals they prefer. Some users want to see charts while others want to see tables. You could create a new report page with a different visualization, but that is a lot to maintain for a single visual. Keep it clean with a few bookmarks.
To get started, I will create my two visuals on the report canvas. It will look cluttered for now, but we will fix that shortly.
The next thing I am going to do is open both the bookmarks and selection panels. I am going to use the selection panel to hide the table of values from the report canvas. Once it is hidden, I will create a bookmark and label it as “Chart”.
Then I will do the same thing to show the matrix visual instead of the chart.
Now I have these bookmarks available in the panel on the right and can use it as desired. Regardless of your consumer’s preference, they can pick the right visual for their needs. A simple and seamless solution!
Making Bookmarks Accessible
Now I already know what you are thinking – this is a great solution, but my users won’t know to use the bookmarks panel! I totally agree with you! Until recently, the only option you had was to add buttons and wire up your bookmarks. But with a recent update to Power BI, we can use the Bookmark Navigator to simplify that process.
Before we add the navigator, a best practice is to group our two bookmarks together. This will allow us to flip between our visuals without interfering with future bookmarks. To group our bookmarks, use control click to select our bookmarks, right click on them, and select group. We can then rename the group to something that makes more sense. I chose “Revenue Visuals”.
With that in place, we can go to insert and click on the button drop down. I can go down to Navigator and select Bookmark Navigator. It will then place the navigator on the canvas and add my bookmarks.
We are almost finished. If you remember what I mentioned earlier about grouping your bookmarks, you need to assign the group to the navigator in the format panel.
The best part about this solution is that as you add more bookmarks to the group, you can easily add them to the visual. Just create a bookmark and add it to the group!
It is true – you cannot make everyone happy. But this might make a few extra people happy with a minimal amount of effort!
Anything Else About Bookmarks?
For report pages that do not have a lot going on, you might be fine with this setup. However, if you try to add a lot of visuals, you might run into performance issues. Instead of updating all visuals, consider changing the bookmark to update the selected visuals instead. Just use your control click on the selection pane to pick the visuals you want to show or hide and update the bookmark accordingly.
I will say, you will probably get your bookmarks wrong the first time. Even as experienced as I am, I occasionally need to keep updating my bookmarks until they are right. You might be frustrated, but don’t give up! I promise you it is worth it in the end!
Have you used bookmarks before? If so, how did you use them? Any favorite use cases? If so, tell me in the comments below!
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