Power BI Drill Through

An exciting new feature appeared in the Power BI web service yesterday.  This is the ability to define a report page as a drill through page.  So far I haven’t seen the September release of Power BI Desktop but I’d be very surprised if this wasn’t included in desktop.  But for the next few days we will have it in the web service only.

So how does this work?  Basically you can now define an individual report page as a Drill-Through page.  Ideally these report pages should be configured across a single entity.  At the Microsoft Data Insights Summit in June we were shown a demo in the keynote that used actors and movies as an example.  In my example I will create a drill through report page for countries and manufacturers.

Log into the Power BI web service and create a new, or edit an existing report.  I’m using the excellent Dashboard in a Day report as my example.

This particular reports starts with 3 pages as shown below

I add a new report page and rename the page “Countries”.   Then drag the country field from the Geography table to the new DrillThrough filter area on the Visualisation pane.

This action defines the report page as a drill through page meaning it can now be drilled through to from other report pages.

In the example below, I use a visualisation on another report page that uses the same Country field on an axis, right click a country and the context menu now offers the Drillthrough option as shown below.

Once I click on the Country from the menu, I am taken to the Country report page I created earlier and this is now filtered by the individual country (in this case by “Australia”).

Note in the image, there is a small arrow in the top left hand corner of the page.  If you control click this arrow it takes you back to the previous page.  I’m also using the new Ribbon Chart that has been added as a native visual (it’s not a custom visual).

I’ve published this page to the web so please give it a try using the following link.

https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiZGNiOGNmZGUtYzYxYy00OTE1LTlkMzYtYWZiZTJkMmE1YzI1IiwidCI6ImNlZmU0NzBiLTVkMDItNGMwOS1iY2ViLWYzOGZkMmZmOWUyZSJ9

I think this is a fantastic addition to Power BI and will allow an even richer experience for users navigating through your data models.  I know of quite a few of my existing reports that I’ll be adding this feature too.

Philip Seamark

Phil is Microsoft Data Platform MVP and an experienced database and business intelligence (BI) professional with a deep knowledge of the Microsoft B.I. stack along with extensive knowledge of data warehouse (DW) methodologies and enterprise data modelling. He has 25+ years experience in this field and an active member of Power BI community.