Twelfth Day of Christmas: Power BI Bookmarks

 🎵 On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me... 

Report resetting bookmarks, 

Data storytelling, 

Data driven emotions,

Meaningful Switches, 

Syncing Slicers Slicing,

Conditional Drill-through Button,

Verified User Selections, 

Dynamic titles,

Custom theme colors,

Appended queries,

Table expanded columns

and

a PDF in Power BI. 🎵

Bookmarks

When I say the word 'bookmark' what do you think of? I must say, I've always had an affinity for bookmarks, but not always Power BI bookmarks. When I was in primary school, a bookmark was a witty or artsy piece of cardboard that I collected more for the love of their design than for their functionality (I plowed through books so quickly I often read them in one sitting). My great grandma knew this and taught me how to crochet bookworms, which she used as gifts for her 4th grade students (who I'm sure also loved them more for their design than their function). 

As I grew older, the books I read got longer and bookmarks became more functional. Design wasn't as important and I used anything and everything to mark my page: paperclips, hair-ties, the due date card from the front of the library book, or a piece of yarn leftover from my knitting. 

In college, bookmarks were a necessity, helping me to keep organized and find important pieces of text, data or references for final reports and exams. I even used bookmarks on a computer to find my favorite sites on the internet. 

Now I sit here writing a blog on bookmarks in Power BI and wondering about the etymology of the word. When did bookmarks move to computers? What book am I marking in Power BI? 

I must say, it is very intuitive to use a good old fashioned bookmark - just slide it in a book on the page you want to be able to return to quickly. To return to that page, simply find the bookmark. If you have lots of pages you want to find, you can get fancy with some colored sticky note tabs, but that's really where the functionality ends.

Power BI Bookmarks

Power BI bookmarks may be slightly less intuitive, but they are so much more powerful. Not only can you use bookmarks to return quickly to a page in your report, you can: 

• save your current filter and slicer settings by enabling the 'Data' bookmark property
• hide or display buttons, visuals and tooltips by enabling the 'Display' bookmark property
• jump to a specific page by enabling the 'Current page' bookmark property

And unlike paper bookmarks, you can put them in any order you want and use them to retell a story in the form of a click through presentation.

Save Filters

Power BI Service has a "Reset to default" option that enables you to restore all filter and slicer settings to how they were saved by the report owner. This means we don't need to create this bookmark ourselves, just teach people how to use the functionality.

However, the "Reset to default" option only resets the filters and slicers to how the report owner designed - it doesn't return you to the original page that the report was saved to start on, and it doesn't let you save filter settings that you have created. In some cases that's exactly what we want, but in our SantaList example, we want to make it really easy for people to return to the Home page and select another name. I want the user to click one button and do two actions: 

1. Navigate to the Home page.
2. Reset filters so no name is selected.

To do this, we will need to use both the 'Data' and 'Current page' properties of the bookmark. The 'Display' property is optional here - the Display property remembers if visuals are hidden, spotlighted, etc. We haven't done any hiding of visuals in this report so it won't matter if we have this property enabled or not.

Lucky for us, the default bookmark has all properties enabled, so we don't need to do a lot of work to make this work. 

How to:

1. Open the SantaList.pbix file.
2. Click the View tab in the ribbon and click the 'Bookmarks' button to turn on the bookmarks pane.
3. Navigate to the 'Home' page and clear all filters. 
4. Click 'Add' in the Bookmarks pane.
5. Rename this bookmark to 'Reset Home'.
6. Navigate to the 'Check the List' page. 
7. Select the 'Return to Santa's Workshop' button you created in Day 7. 
1. Change the Action to 'Bookmark'
2. Select the 'Reset Home' bookmark
8. Save and test the report.

There are so many cool things you can do with bookmarks, this is just the beginning. I highly recommend you explore and see what you can do, and comment with any questions or struggles you encounter. 

Thanks for celebrating the 12 Days of Christmas with me. If you missed any of the days, check them out in the links above. I hope you've enjoyed the posts, learned something new and are inspired to build stunning data stories in 2021.