How to Hide Pages Pane in Power BI Service

Looking to create a cleaner, more focused experience in your Power BI reports? The default pages pane is great for developers, but it can make reports feel cluttered and less intuitive for your end-users. Hiding it gives your report a custom, app-like feel and lets you guide your audience through the data exactly as you intended. This article will walk you through exactly how to hide the pages pane, transforming your standard report into a polished, professional dashboard.

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Why Should You Hide the Pages Pane?

Hiding the report page navigation isn't just about making things look tidy, it’s a strategic design choice that dramatically improves the user's experience. By taking control of navigation, you can guide users and help them focus on the insights you want to share.

• Create a Guided Narrative: You control the story. By using custom buttons and navigation elements, you can create a specific, intended pathway through your report. This is essential for effective data storytelling, ensuring users follow a logical progression from high-level summaries to detailed breakdowns.
• Reduce Visual Clutter: For stakeholders who aren't Power BI experts, the standard interface can be overwhelming. Removing the pages pane creates a simplified, minimalist view that puts the focus squarely on the data visualizations, making the report less intimidating for the user and easier to understand.
• Deliver a Polished, App-Like Experience: When you provide your own navigation, the report feels less like a BI file and more like a custom-built web application. This elevates the perceived user's experience of your work and provides a more professional, branded feel for clients or executives.
• Prevent Unintended Navigation: Hiding the default pages pane prevents users from accidentally clicking on a page out of sequence, which could break the narrative you’ve designed or cause confusion if specific filters or states are required on certain pages.

Step 1: Build Custom Navigation in Power BI Desktop

Before you can hide Power BI’s default navigation, you must provide a new way for your users to get around. If you don't, you'll leave them stranded on a single page with no way to access the rest of your report. The best practice is to build your custom navigation first in Power BI Desktop.

Here are the two must-know methods for doing this:

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Method 1: Using Custom Buttons and Actions

Buttons offer complete creative flexibility, allowing you to design a navigation system that perfectly matches your brand and report style.

1. Insert a Button: Go to the Insert tab on the Power BI ribbon. In the Elements section, click Buttons and choose a style. The Blank button is the most versatile option, as you can customize its shape, icon, and text.
2. Position and Style It: Drag the button to your desired location, such as a header or a side-panel you've created. Use the Format pane to customize its appearance under Shape, Style, and Fill.
3. Assign an Action: This is the most critical step. With the button selected, go to the Format pane, turn the Action toggle on, and expand the card.
4. Add a Tooltip: In the Action card, you'll find a field for Tooltip. Add descriptive text like "Go to the Sales Summary page" to help users understand what the button does when they hover over it.

Repeat this process for every page you want users to navigate to. A great best practice is to include a "Home" button on every page so users can always return to your main dashboard.

Method 2: Using the Built-In Page Navigator Visual (The Easy Way)

For a quicker setup, Power BI’s Page Navigator automatically creates navigation buttons for every visible report page - an excellent time-saving feature!

1. Go to the Insert tab on the Ribbon.
2. Click Buttons, then hover over Navigator and select Page navigator.
3. Power BI will instantly create a navigation item for each page in your report.

From here, you can use the Format pane to customize it. You can change the layout from horizontal to vertical, adjust the shape of the buttons, and change the colors for default, hover, and selected states.

Pro Tip: If you want a page to exist in your report but don't want it to appear in the Page Navigator visual, you can simply hide the page. Right-click the page's tab at the bottom of Power BI Desktop and select Hide page. The navigator will automatically update.

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Step 2: Hide the Pages Pane in Power BI Service

Once your custom navigation is complete, it's time to publish your report and configure the viewing experience. It's important to understand the difference between a workspace and an app in Power BI.

• Workspace: This is a collaborative environment for developers and analysts. The navigation and other panes are typically visible here to support report editing and creation.
• App: An app is a delivery method you'll use to bundle reports and dashboards into a final, user-friendly view. Apps are where you share reports with consumers in a polished, read-only view. This is where you hide the navigation pane.

Follow these steps to configure your report in a Power BI App:

Publish and Configure the App

1. Publish Your Report: After saving your changes in Power BI Desktop, click the Publish button on the Home ribbon and choose the destination workspace.
2. Go to the Workspace: Open your browser and navigate to app.powerbi.com and enter the workspace where you published the report.
3. Create or Update the App:
4. Navigate to Content Settings: Click Next on the Setup tab to move to the Content tab. Add your report to the app by clicking + Add content.
5. Hide the Navigation Pane:
6. Finalize and Publish: Go to the Audience tab to set permissions for who can view the app. Finally, click Publish app (or Update app).

Now, when you share the link to the app, your end-users will see the report with your custom navigation elements, and the default pages pane will be completely hidden.

Alternative Method: Hiding the Pane with a URL Parameter

In some situations, you might want to send a direct link to a report without publishing an app. You can hide the navigation pane using a simple URL parameter. This method is useful for quickly sharing in an email or embedding a report in platforms like SharePoint.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Navigate to your report in Power BI Service.
2. Copy the URL from your browser's address bar.
3. Paste the URL into a text editor, and add the following snippet to the very end of the URL: &navContentPaneEnabled=false
4. Your final link should look something like this: https://app.powerbi.com/groups/me/reports/your-report-id/ReportSection?&navContentPaneEnabled=false

Important consideration: While this works quickly, it is not a secure method for professional distribution. An advanced Power BI user can simply delete the parameter from the URL to reveal the navigation pane. The Power BI App method is the most robust and recommended way when sharing insights and visualizations with consumers and business users.

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Final Thoughts

Transforming your report's usability is as simple as building a clear, custom navigation and hiding Power BI's default pages pane. By building a user-friendly experience within a Power BI app, you shift focus so everyone on the team can make insightful, data-driven decisions.

Setting up custom themes, navigating app configurations, and remembering URL parameters are all part of the learning curve with traditional BI tools. We built Graphed to remove this complexity altogether. Instead of diving through settings panes and writing code to create interactive and useful insights for your marketing team and others, with Graphed, you can connect your data automatically in seconds - and simply use plain English to build the exact, custom dashboards you need. It gives all your data back to you in a way that is easy to work with, so you and your team can generate helpful insights every time you go to answer and ask new questions about your company's progress over time.