Power BI Lesson 9: Slicers, Drill-Down, Tooltips and Bookmarks

📎 This article includes 2 downloadable practice files ↓

⏱ 2 min read

📘 Power BI & DAX Beginner Course · Lesson 9 of 10

In this article
  1. Slicers
  2. Cross-filtering and interactions
  3. Drill-down
  4. Drill-through: a detail page
  5. Bookmarks
  6. Where beginners go wrong
  7. Practice

Interactivity is what makes Power BI better than a static Excel chart: people answer their own follow-up questions by clicking.

Slicers

  • Add a slicer for FY, Region and Category. Style: dropdown saves space; tiles/buttons are friendlier.
  • View › Sync slicers: make the FY slicer apply on every page.
  • Single select for FY (one year at a time); multi-select for Region.

Cross-filtering and interactions

Clicking a bar filters the other visuals on the page. Control it: select a visual › Format › Edit interactions, then choose filter, highlight or none on each other visual. Cards showing grand totals often should not be filtered.

Drill-down

Put FY › FYQuarter › Month on a chart’s axis (a hierarchy). Turn on drill mode (the down arrow) and click a year to see its quarters, then months. The double arrow expands all levels.

Drill-through: a detail page

  1. Create a page “Customer detail” with visuals about one customer.
  2. Drag Customers[Customer] into its Drill-through well.
  3. On any page, right-click a customer in a visual › Drill through › Customer detail.

The detail page opens filtered to that customer, with a back button.

💡 Report-page tooltips: create a small page (Page information > Allow use as tooltip, canvas size Tooltip), put a mini chart on it, then set it as the tooltip of a visual. Hovering shows a chart instead of a plain number.

Bookmarks

View › Bookmarks saves the current state (filters, selected visuals, hidden items). Use them for “North view” / “All India” buttons, or to switch between chart and table with two visuals in the same spot (hide one per bookmark). Add Insert › Buttons linked to bookmarks.

⚠️ Bookmarks capture data filters by default. If a bookmark should only switch visuals, untick ‘Data’ in its options, or it will also reset people’s slicer choices.

Where beginners go wrong

Problem Fix
Different years on different pages Sync slicers
Card total changes when clicking a bar Edit interactions › None for that card
Users don’t discover drill-through Add a note or a button

Practice

Download the data model and expected results below. Load all four tables into Power BI Desktop and build this lesson’s steps; compare your numbers with the expected-results workbook.

📎 Practice files for this article

  • 📗
    Practice data model (Excel)Four tables: Sales (600 orders, FY 2024-25 and 2025-26), Products, Customers and a Calendar with FY columns.
    ⬇ XLSX · 40 KB
  • 📗
    Expected resultsThe values your measures and visuals should show.
    ⬇ XLSX · 7 KB

Free to use for learning. Files with macros (.bas) are plain text — import them with Alt+F11 → File → Import File, and always test on a copy.

Keep reading

Power BI & DAXPower BI Lesson 10: Publish, Refresh and Share (Project)Power BI & DAXPower BI Lesson 6: CALCULATE and Filter ContextPower BI & DAXPower BI Lesson 1: Desktop Tour and Loading Data
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