How to Add Drill Through in Power BI

Your high-level summary dashboard looks great, but the moment you present it, the questions begin: "What specific transactions make up that sales number for the 'Electronics' category?" or "Can we see the individual deals behind that quarterly revenue figure?" This is where Power BI's Drill Through feature comes into play, allowing you to build reports that elegantly hide complexity while still providing instant access to detailed data. This article will guide you through exactly how to set up, customize, and use drill-through functionality to make your reports a lot more interactive and insightful.

What is Drill Through in Power BI? (and How is it different from Drill Down?)

Think of drill through as a way to create a 'destination' report page that’s contextually filtered based on what a user selects on another 'source' page. When a user right-clicks on a data point in a chart (like a bar representing a product category), they can jump to a detailed report page that shows them only the underlying data for that specific category. It effectively creates a pathway from your summary visuals to the granular data that supports them.

It's easy to confuse this with "Drill Down." The key difference is direction:

• Drill Down: This is for exploring levels within a single visual that has a hierarchy. You can start with 'Year', drill down to 'Quarter,' then to 'Month,' all in the same chart. Your direction is vertical, going deeper into a hierarchy.
• Drill Through: This is for moving from one visual to a completely different page. Your direction is horizontal, jumping between report pages to get more context.

Using drill through keeps your main dashboard clean and focused on key performance indicators (KPIs), while still providing stakeholders the power to investigate the numbers they care about with a single click. No more building dozens of nearly-identical report pages for every possible filter combination.

Setting Up Your First Drill Through: A Step-by-Step Guide

The best way to understand drill through is to build one yourself. We’ll use a common business scenario: analyzing sales data. We'll start with a summary page showing total sales by product category and create a drill-through link to a second page that displays the individual transactions for any selected category.

Step 1: Create a Source and a Destination Page

Every drill-through setup requires at least two pages in your Power BI report:

1. The Source Page: This is your main dashboard or summary page. It contains the high-level visuals that you want your users to start from. For our example, let's call this page "Sales Overview."
2. The Destination Page: This is the detailed report page users will 'drill through' to. It should be designed to show granular data. Let's call this page "Transaction Details."

On your "Sales Overview" page, create a simple visual, like a stacked bar chart showing 'Total Sales' by 'Product Category'. This will be our source visual.

Step 2: Build Your Destination (Detail) Page

Now, click over to your "Transaction Details" page. This is where you’ll show the granular information. A table or a matrix visual is perfect for this.

On this page, create a table that includes columns like 'Transaction ID', 'Customer Name', 'Product Name', 'Quantity', and 'Sale Amount'. The idea is to show all the raw rows of data that make up the category totals on your summary page.

Step 3: Configure the Drill Through Field

This is where the connection happens. With the "Transaction Details" page selected, go to the Visualizations pane on the right-hand side. Look for the "Add drill-through fields here" well at the bottom of the pane.

From your Fields list, find the field that links your summary to your details. In our case, this is 'Product Category'. Drag 'Product Category' and drop it into that drill-through well.

As soon as you add a field to this area, Power BI does two things:

• It designates this page as a drill-through destination.
• It automatically adds a “Back” button to the top-left of your report canvas. This button lets users easily navigate back to their starting page after they've finished viewing the details.

Step 4: See it in Action!

Now for the fun part. Navigate back to your "Sales Overview" source page.

1. Hover over one of the bars in your 'Sales by Product Category' chart.
2. Right-click the bar.
3. In the context menu that appears, you’ll now see an option for Drill through.
4. Hover over it, and you'll see your destination page, "Transaction Details."
5. Click it.

You will immediately be taken to the "Transaction Details" page, but you'll notice it’s automatically been filtered. The table now only shows transactions for the specific 'Product Category' you right-clicked on. Success! The user can now use the back button to return to the summary page and explore another category.

Improving the User Experience: Custom Buttons and Tips

The default right-click method works, but it's not always intuitive for end-users who may not be familiar with Power BI. You can greatly improve the experience with a few enhancements.

Option 1: Customizing the Back Button

The default back button is functional but plain. You can select it and modify it just like a shape. In the Format pane, you can change the icon, its color, add text like "Return to Overview," and style it to match your report's theme, making navigation feel more professional.

Option 2: Creating a Dedicated Drill Through Button

An even better approach is to create a visible button that guides the user. This makes it obvious that more detail is available.

1. Go to your source page ("Sales Overview").
2. From the Ribbon, go to Insert > Buttons > Blank.
3. Position your new button near the source chart.
4. With the button selected, go to the Format pane. Go to Action and turn it on.
5. For the Type, select Drill through.
6. For the Destination, select your "Transaction Details" page.

Now, go to the Button style options. You can set different text for different states. For the Default state, you might enter text like "Select a category to see details." This text will be shown when no data is selected.

The key here is that the button will be disabled by default. It only becomes active when a user selects a single data point on the source visual it’s tied to (in our case, one product category). After a user clicks on a category bar, the button will become active and its text can change to something like "Click for transaction detail." This provides a clear, guided call to action.

Practical Tip: Using the "Keep all filters" Toggle

Back on your destination page, in the Drill Through settings well, you’ll see a toggle for "Keep all filters." Here’s what it does:

• On (Default): If your source page has other filters applied (e.g., a slicer for the year '2023'), these filters will also be passed to your destination page. So you'd see detailed transactions for the chosen category only from 2023. This is usually the behavior you want.
• Off: This will ignore any other filters from the source page. The destination page will only be filtered by the drill-through field itself (e.g., 'Product Category'). This can be useful if your destination page is meant to be a broader overview, regardless of context from the previous page.

Advanced Tip: Cross-Report Drill Through

For more complex scenarios, you can even drill through between different reports published in the Power BI service. This is great for organizations that have separate reports for different subject areas (e.g., a Sales PBIX file and an Inventory PBIX file).

The setup is similar, but requires a quick step in Power BI options. Go to File > Options and settings > Options. Under the 'Current File' section, go to 'Report settings' and check the box that says "Allow visuals in this report to use drill-through targets from other reports." You must enable this setting on both the source and destination reports, and the field names and table names you’re using to drill through must match exactly between the two data models.

Final Thoughts

Configuring a drill through is a fundamental skill for moving beyond simple, flat reports in Power BI. By creating intuitive paths from summary dashboards to detailed data, you empower users to answer their own questions and build a far more valuable and interactive analytics tool. From basic setup to custom buttons, these are techniques that can elevate any report you build.

Of course, building sophisticated, multi-layered reports in a tool like Power BI takes time and can involve a steep learning curve. For teams that need to get insights quickly from multiple data sources without all the manual setup, that's exactly why we built Graphed. It allows you to connect data from platforms like Shopify, Google Analytics, Salesforce, and Facebook Ads in seconds and create dashboards just by describing what you want to see—letting you literally drill down by asking follow-up questions in plain English instead of building special report pages by hand.