How to Create Interactive Dashboards in Power BI

A static report is a picture of the past, but an interactive dashboard is a conversation with your data. Microsoft Power BI excels at turning rows and columns into dynamic stories your team can engage with. This guide will walk you through the essential techniques for building interactive dashboards in Power BI, using features like slicers, bookmarks, and drillthrough to bring your data to life.

What Makes a Power BI Dashboard Truly Interactive?

Interactivity separates a modern dashboard from a printed spreadsheet. An interactive dashboard invites users to ask their own questions and explore the data on their own terms. Instead of creating multiple charts to show sales by region, you create one chart that users can filter and slice to their heart's content.

In Power BI, this is accomplished through key elements:

• Slicers & Filters: These allow users to narrow down the data shown in the entire report with a click - for example, viewing data for only "Q4" or just the "West Region."
• Cross-filtering: Clicking on a data point in one visual (like a bar in a bar chart) automatically filters the other visuals on the page to show data related only to that selection.
• Bookmarks: These save a specific "state" of a report page - including filters, slicers, and sort orders - letting you create custom navigation or different views of the same data.
• Drillthrough: This feature lets users right-click a data point on a summary chart and "drill through" to a separate, detailed report page that is pre-filtered for that specific data point.

Mastering these will change how you and your team consume data.

Step 1: Connect and Prepare Your Data

Before you can build anything, you need raw material. The quality of your dashboard depends entirely on the quality of your underlying data. Let's assume you have a sales dataset in an Excel file with columns like Date, Product, Region, Sales Rep, and Revenue.

1. Get Data: In Power BI Desktop, navigate to the Home tab and click Get Data. Select Excel workbook and locate your sales file.
2. Load Data: Power BI’s Navigator will show you the tables or sheets within your file. Select the sheet containing your sales data and click Load. If your data is messy (e.g., inconsistent names, empty rows), you'd click Transform Data first to clean it up in the Power Query Editor. We'll assume it's clean and ready to go for this tutorial.

Your data is now loaded into the Power BI data model, ready to be visualized.

Step 2: Build Your Base Visuals

With data loaded, you can start painting your canvas. Don’t worry about interactivity just yet, the first step is to get your key performance indicators (KPIs) onto the page. A great dashboard gives a bird's-eye view before allowing for deep dives.

Let's create a basic sales overview report:

• Total Revenue Card: Select the Card visual from the Visualizations pane. Drag your Revenue field into the "Fields" area. This will show a single, large number representing your total revenue.
• Revenue by Region Bar Chart: Select the Stacked bar chart visual. Drag the Region field to the "Y-axis" and the Revenue field to the "X-axis." You now have a clear comparison of which regions are performing best.
• Revenue Over Time Line Chart: Select the Line chart visual. Drag the Date field to the "X-axis" and Revenue to the "Y-axis." Power BI automatically creates a date hierarchy so you can see trends by year, quarter, or month.

At this point, you have an informative but static report. If you click on the "West" bar in your bar chart, you'll notice all the other visuals on the page update to show data for only that region. This is called cross-filtering, and it's the most basic form of interactivity built into Power BI.

Step 3: Add Slicers for On-the-Fly Filtering

Slicers are one of the most popular interactive features in Power BI. They are on-screen filters that anyone viewing the dashboard can use to narrow down the data.

Let's add a slicer to filter our sales report by Product.

1. Click on a blank space on your report canvas to ensure no visuals are selected.
2. Select the Slicer icon from the Visualizations pane.
3. With the new slicer selected, drag the Product field from the Data pane into the "Field" well of the slicer.

You now have a list of all your products. Clicking on any product name in the slicer will instantly filter your Total Revenue, Revenue by Region, and Revenue Over Time visuals to reflect data for only that selected product. Simple, fast, and powerful.

Pro Tip: You can format your slicer to be a list, dropdown, or buttons. With the slicer selected, go to the Format visual pane. Under Slicer settings > Style, you can choose a style that fits your dashboard layout. The "Tile" style is great for showing just a few options as buttons.

Step 4: Create Different Views with Bookmarks

If you want to create pre-defined "views" for your audience without creating multiple report pages, Bookmarks come in handy. They act as a "saved snapshot" of your report's state, capturing every filter, slicer, and sort setting.

Creating Your Bookmarks

1. Set Your View: Get your report page looking exactly how you want it for your saved view. For instance, use your Product slicer to select three different products from the "Electronics" category.
2. Open the Bookmarks Pane: Go to the View tab in the ribbon and check the box for Bookmarks. A new pane will appear.
3. Add a Bookmark: In the Bookmarks pane, click Add. A new bookmark ("Bookmark 1") will appear. Double-click it and rename it something informative, like "Electronics View."
4. Create another one: Clear the slicer selections, select "Services," and add a bookmark named "Services View."

Connecting Bookmarks to Buttons

1. Insert a Button: Go to the Insert tab, click Buttons, and select Blank. Drag the button to a logical place on your dashboard.
2. Configure the Action: Select the new button. In the Format pane to the right, turn On the Action toggle.
3. Link the Bookmark: Under Action, set the Type to Bookmark. In the Bookmark dropdown that appears, select "Electronics View."
4. Label Your Button: Still in the Format pane, go to Style and add "Electronics View" to the Text field so users know what it does.

Repeat this process to create a second button linked to your "Services View." Now, users can toggle between these two filtered views with a single click, creating a seamless, app-like experience.

Step 5: Dive Deeper with Drillthrough

Sometimes, a high-level summary isn’t enough. A drillthrough allows deeper analysis, transforming a visual from an endpoint into a gateway. It lets users right-click a data point and jump to another report page containing detailed information.

Setting up a Drillthrough Page

1. Create a Detail Page: Create a new page in your Power BI file named "Regional Details." This page is your drillthrough destination.
2. Add Your Detail Visuals: Add visuals that provide granular detail, such as a table showing Revenue by Sales Rep and another showing Revenue by Product.
3. Designate it as a Drillthrough Page: Make sure no visuals are selected. In the Visualizations pane, find the box labeled Add drill-through fields here. Drag the field you want to drill from into this box. Drag Region from your Data pane into this well.

Once you do this, Power BI automatically adds a "Back" button to your detail page. Now, go back to your main dashboard page. Right-click the "West" bar in your region chart. You’ll see a new option: Drill through > Regional Details. Clicking this will take you to the detail page, and all the visuals on that page will already be filtered to show data just for the West region. You've built an interactive path from summary to detail.

Final Thoughts

By learning to add slicers for filtering, bookmarks for custom views, and drillthrough for deep dives, you can elevate your Power BI reports from static documents to dynamic analysis tools. These features empower your team to explore data, uncover insights, and make better decisions without having to ask for a new report for every question.

While mastering tools like Power BI is a valuable skill, it often involves a steep learning curve and hours spent clicking, configuring, and formatting. We created Graphed because we believe getting answers from your data shouldn't require an 80-hour training course. Graphed connects to your live marketing and sales data sources in seconds and lets you build interactive dashboards just by asking questions in plain English. Instead of manually adding slicers or setting up drillthrough pages, you can just ask, "Show me revenue by region, and let me filter by product," and have a live, shareable dashboard in moments.