How to Create Bookmark Button in Power BI

Making your Power BI reports more interactive can transform them from a static slide into a dynamic, app-like experience for your team. Using a bookmark button is one of the easiest ways to do this, allowing you to save specific views of your data and let users switch between them with a single click. In this guide, we’ll walk you through exactly how to create and use bookmark buttons to make your reports clearer, more engaging, and easier to navigate.

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What Are Bookmarks in Power BI?

Think of a Power BI bookmark as an interactive snapshot of your report. It doesn’t just capture what the page looks like, it captures the state of the page at that moment. When you create a bookmark, you’re saving a specific configuration that you can return to at any time.

This includes things like:

• Filters and Slicers: The current selections you've made on any filters or slicers. For example, a filter might be set to "USA" or a date range slicer to "Last 30 Days."
• Sort Order: The way you’ve sorted your tables or charts, such as sorting sales data from highest to lowest.
• Visual States: The drill-down level of a particular visual.
• Object Visibility: Whether certain charts, tables, or images are visible or hidden, which you can control using the Selection pane.

By connecting these saved bookmarks to buttons, you give users a simple way to navigate between different data stories or views without having to manually adjust a dozen filters themselves. It’s a powerful feature for guiding their analysis and highlighting the most important insights in your data.

Why Should You Use Bookmarks and Buttons?

Using bookmark buttons isn't just a neat trick, it solves common reporting challenges and dramatically improves the user experience. You can use them to build advanced, intuitive functionality directly into your dashboards.

1. Create Guided Storytelling

Walk your audience through your P&L statement, a sales funnel, or a campaign performance review. You can create a series of bookmarks that build on each other, revealing one part of the analysis at a time. By setting up "Previous" and "Next" buttons, you turn your report into an interactive presentation, letting stakeholders explore the data at their own pace while following the narrative you’ve designed.

2. Offer Pre-defined Custom Views

Your audience may want to see the same data in different ways. For example, a sales manager might want to toggle between "Year-to-Date Performance," "Quarterly Trend," and "Monthly Comparison." Instead of forcing them to use multiple slicers, you can create three separate buttons that instantly reconfigure the entire report page. This helps non-technical users get the answers they need quickly without getting lost in the filters.

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3. Toggle Visuals and Create Pop-ups

Sometimes, a report can feel cluttered with too much information. You can use bookmarks to hide detailed charts or tables by default, letting users reveal them only when needed. A common example is a "Show Details" button that makes a data table visible or a "Show Chart" button that swaps a table for a visual. This keeps your dashboard clean and intuitive while providing a deeper layer of information for those who want to investigate further.

4. Build a Custom Navigation Menu

For reports with many pages, the default tabs at the bottom of Power BI can feel clunky. You can use buttons and bookmarks to build a custom navigation menu at the top or side of your report. This makes your Power BI report feel less like a spreadsheet and more like a professionally designed web application, making navigation far more intuitive for your end-users.

How to Create a Bookmark Button in Power BI: Step-by-Step

Ready to build your first one? Let’s walk through a common example: creating buttons to switch between sales data for different regions.

Step 1: Prepare Your Report Views

Before you create a bookmark, you need to set up the report page exactly as you want it to look for that bookmark. Let's imagine you have a sales dashboard and want to create two dedicated views: one for USA sales and one for Canada sales.

First, configure the page for the "USA Sales" view. Use a slicer or the filter pane to filter your data so it only shows sales from the USA. All your charts and graphs should update accordingly. This is the first state you want to save.

Step 2: Open the Bookmark and Selection Panes

To start creating bookmarks, you need the right tools visible. Go to the View tab in the Power BI ribbon at the top. Here, you'll see a section called "Show panes." Check the boxes for both Bookmarks and Selection. These panes will appear on the right side of your screen. The Bookmarks pane is where you'll save your views, and the Selection pane lets you see and control the visibility of every object on your page.

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Step 3: Create Your First Bookmark

Now that your report is filtered to show USA sales, go to the Bookmarks pane and click the Add button. A new bookmark will appear, likely named "Bookmark 1." It's critical to rename your bookmarks to keep them organized. Double-click the name and change it to something descriptive, like "USA Sales View." You've now officially saved your first interactive snapshot.

Step 4: Create Additional Bookmarks for Other Views

Next, let's create the view for Canada. Nothing is final yet, so you can change the filters on your report without issue. Change your slicer or filter from "USA" to "Canada." Your visuals will update to show Canadian sales data.

Back in the Bookmarks pane, click Add again. Rename this new bookmark to "Canada Sales View." For a better user experience, it's also a good idea to create a "reset" state. Clear all filters so your dashboard shows the default, unfiltered data, and add a third bookmark named "All Sales (Default)."

Step 5: Insert Buttons onto Your Report Canvas

Now that your views are saved, it's time to add buttons for users to click. Go to the Insert tab in the ribbon. Click the Buttons dropdown and select Blank. A blank button will appear on your report. Drag it to where you want your navigation panel to be. Create another one so you have two buttons - one for each regional view.

Step 6: Customize Your Button's Appearance

Select the first button. In the Format pane on the right, find the Text section. Toggle it On and type in "USA Sales." You can also change the font, size, and color to match your report's design.

Select the second button and do the same, but this time, set the text to "Canada Sales." Customize the fill color, borders, and shape to make them look like professional navigation elements.

Step 7: Connect the Button to Your Bookmark

This is where the magic happens. Select the "USA Sales" button. In the Format pane, find the Action section and toggle it On.

• In the Type dropdown, select Bookmark.
• A second dropdown for Bookmark will appear. Select your "USA Sales View" bookmark.

Now, repeat the process for your other button. Select the "Canada Sales" button, turn on the Action, set the Type to Bookmark, and select the "Canada Sales View" bookmark.

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Step 8: Test Your New Bookmark Buttons

Your interactive buttons are now set up. To test them in Power BI Desktop, you need to hold down the Ctrl key while you click. In the published Power BI Service online, it's just a normal click.

Ctrl + click your "USA Sales" button, and you should see the report instantly filter to the USA view you saved. Then, Ctrl + click the "Canada Sales" button to see it switch to the Canada view. If you created a "Reset" button, try that one too!

Pro Tips for Using Bookmarks Like an Expert

Once you've mastered the basics, you can elevate your reports with these more advanced bookmarking techniques.

Create Hide/Show Pop-ups

Want to unclutter your report? Use bookmarks to hide detailed charts or tables and reveal them with a button click. For this, you’ll heavily use the Selection pane.

1. Place a detailed table or chart on your report.
2. In the Selection pane, find the name of that visual and click the small eye icon next to it. This will hide the visual on your report canvas. For a more professional touch, group all the hidden visuals together with a background "pop-up" shape.
3. With the visual(s) hidden, create a new bookmark and name it "Hide Details Pane."
4. Now, unhide the visual(s) by clicking the eye icon again. Create a second bookmark and name it "Show Details Pane."
5. Create two buttons - one linked to "Show Details" and another (an "X" icon works perfectly) on top of the 'pop-up' to hide it back again - linked to "Hide Details".

You’ve just built an interactive pop-up window without writing a single line of code.

Control Specific Bookmark Behaviors

By default, a bookmark captures everything: data filters, visible objects, and sort orders. But you can be more selective. In the Bookmarks pane, click the ellipsis (...) next to any bookmark. You'll see several options:

• Data: Deselect this if you only want your bookmark to change visual properties (like showing or hiding something) without altering the current data filters.
• Display: This captures the sort order and other display properties of visuals. Usually, you'll want to keep this enabled.
• Selected Visuals: This is a powerful feature. Instead of the bookmark applying to the entire page, you can have it apply to only the visuals you have selected. This is great for creating isolated changes in just one part of your report while leaving everything else intact.

Final Thoughts

Learning how to use a bookmark button in Power BI is a game-changer for anyone looking to go beyond basic charts and graphs. It transforms static reports into dynamic, user-friendly tools that help teams answer their own questions, follow a clear data story, and find valuable insights faster without the usual clutter and confusion.

Ultimately, the goal of creating interactive reports is to make it simpler for anyone to get clear answers from their company data. We found that even the most well-designed dashboards could become a bottleneck. That’s why we built Graphed , which eliminates the need to manually build and customize reports altogether. Instead of dragging and dropping visuals or configuring buttons, you can just ask questions in plain English - like "Show me sales in the USA vs Canada" - and get a live, interactive dashboard built for you in seconds.