How to Delete Multiple Pages in Power BI

Cleaning up a Microsoft Power BI report with dozens of pages can feel like a chore. While deleting a single page is easy, Power BI doesn't currently offer a simple, built-in way to select and delete multiple pages at once. This article will show you two effective workarounds to quickly delete multiple pages, saving you from an endless cycle of right-clicking and confirming.

Why Can't You Just Select and Delete Pages in Power BI?

If you're used to applications like Excel or PowerPoint where you can hold down <code>Ctrl</code> or <code>Shift</code> to select multiple worksheet tabs or slides, Power BI's interface might seem a bit limited in this respect. The inability to multi-select page tabs for hiding, reordering, or deleting is a long-standing frustration for many developers. While it’s a highly requested feature, it hasn't been implemented in Power BI Desktop yet.

This limitation becomes particularly noticeable when:

• You inherit a large, messy report from a colleague and need to trim it down.
• You create numerous test pages for A/B testing visuals and now need to remove the drafts.
• You want to repurpose a comprehensive report for a different audience by removing irrelevant sections.

Each page deletion requires you to right-click the tab, select 'Delete page,' and then click 'Delete' again on the confirmation pop-up. Multiply that by 20, 30, or 50 pages, and you've lost a significant chunk of your day to mundane clicks. Fortunately, there are smarter ways to handle this.

Method 1: The "Keep the Good Stuff" Copy-Paste Technique

This method doesn't involve deleting pages directly from your initial report. Instead, you create a new, clean report by selectively copying over only the pages you want to keep. It's the safest and most straightforward approach, perfect for anyone who isn't comfortable editing system files directly.

Think of it as creating a new playlist with your favorite songs instead of deleting all the ones you don't like from a massive library.

Step-by-Step Instructions:

1. Open Your Main Report: Launch Power BI Desktop and open the .pbix file that contains the pages you want to manage.
2. Launch a New Power BI Instance: Don't close your current report. Open a second, blank Power BI Desktop session. You can do this by simply running the application again from your Start Menu or taskbar. You should now have two windows open: your original report and a new, untitled report.
3. Copy the Pages to Keep: Go back to your original report. For each page you want to keep, right-click on the page tab at the bottom of the screen and select Copy Page.
4. Paste into the New Report: Switch over to the blank Power BI window. The canvas will be empty. Simply press Ctrl + V on your keyboard. Power BI will paste the entire page - visuals, formatting, and all - into your new report. A new page tab will appear at the bottom.
5. Repeat for All Necessary Pages: Continue this copy-paste process for every page you wish to preserve. As you paste them, they will be added sequentially in the new report. You can reorder them later by dragging the tabs.
6. Save Your New Report: Once all the pages you want to keep have been successfully copied into the new file, go to File > Save As and give your clean report a new name (e.g., Q3 Sales Report - Slim Version.pbix).

You now have a new, lean .pbix file containing only the essential pages. You can safely archive or delete the bloated original.

Pros and Cons of This Method

• Pros:
• Cons:

Method 2: Directly Editing the PBIX File (The Advanced Way)

This method is for more technical users who are comfortable handling JSON files. It is by far the fastest way to delete a large number of pages, but it comes with a significant warning: a small mistake can corrupt your entire Power BI file. Always work on a backup copy.

Essentially, a .pbix file is a compressed archive (like a .zip file) that contains all the elements of your report. By unzipping it, we can access the underlying definition files, edit one of them to remove the pages, and then package it back up.

Warning: Always perform these steps on a copy of your report. If you make a typo in the JSON file, the report may become unreadable by Power BI Desktop, and you will need to start over with a fresh copy.

Step-by-Step Instructions:

1. Create a Backup: Find your .pbix file in Windows Explorer. Copy and paste it in the same directory to create a backup. Work only on the copy (e.g., MyReport - Copy.pbix).
2. Change the File Extension to .zip: Right-click your copied file, select Rename, and change the extension from .pbix to .zip. Windows will show a warning about the file potentially becoming unusable. Click Yes to proceed.
3. Extract the Files: Right-click the newly renamed .zip file and select Extract All.... This will create a folder containing all the internal report components.
4. Locate the layout.json File: Open the extracted folder and navigate to the Report subfolder. Inside, you will find a file named layout.json. This file contains the definitions for your report's layout, including all the pages.
5. Edit the JSON: Open layout.json with a text editor like VS Code or Notepad++. You can use regular Notepad, but the formatting is not as clear. You’ll see a large block of JSON code. Look for an element named "sections". Its value is an array [ ... ] containing a series of objects { ... }, where each object represents one page in your report. You can identify each page by its "displayName".
6. Delete the Page Objects: Carefully identify the entire JSON object for each page you want to remove — from its opening curly brace { to its closing brace }. Delete this entire block. The most important thing here is to also delete the trailing comma from the object before the one you removed, if it now becomes the last item in the array. JSON syntax requires commas between elements but not after the last one.

For example, if you want to delete the 'Draft Visuals' page, you would change this:

"sections": [
    {
        "name": "ReportSection1",
        "displayName": "Executive Summary",
        "ordinal": 0,
        ...
    },
    {
        "name": "ReportSection2",
        "displayName": "Draft Visuals",
        "ordinal": 1,
        ...
    },
    {
        "name": "ReportSection3",
        "displayName": "Sales Deep Dive",
        "ordinal": 2,
        ...
    }
]

To this:

"sections": [
    {
        "name": "ReportSection1",
        "displayName": "Executive Summary",
        "ordinal": 0,
        ...
    },
    {
        "name": "ReportSection3",
        "displayName": "Sales Deep Dive",
        "ordinal": 2,
        ...
    }
]

Notice the comma after the closing brace of the "Executive Summary" object was also removed since "Sales Deep Dive" is now the last object in that list.

1. Save and Close the File: Save your changes to layout.json and close the text editor.
2. Re-compress the Files: Go back to the root of your extracted folder. Select all the files and folders inside, right-click, and choose Send to > Compressed (zipped) folder.
3. Rename Back to .pbix: A new .zip file will be created. Rename it to what you want (e.g., MyReport - Cleaned.pbix), changing the extension back from .zip to .pbix.
4. Test the Report: Open your new cleaned .pbix file. If you edited the JSON correctly, the report will open successfully, and the pages you deleted will be gone. If it fails to open, it means there was a syntax error in your JSON, and you'll need to restart the process from your backup copy.

Pros and Cons of This Method

• Pros:
• Cons:

Final Thoughts

To recap, while Power BI doesn't currently provide a one-click way to remove multiple pages, you have solid workarounds. You can either use the safe and simple copy-paste method to build a new report with only the pages you need or dive into the report's code by editing the JSON for a faster but riskier solution. The right choice depends on the size of your report and your comfort level with editing system files.

This kind of manual file manipulation highlights the time many analysts spend just managing report files instead of extracting real insights. At Graphed, we’ve focused on eliminating precisely this type of friction. You can connect your marketing and sales data sources one time, then simply ask our AI to create the dashboards you need using natural language. No more juggling .pbix files or navigating complex interfaces - just straightforward conversations that lead directly to actionable, real-time reports.