How to Make a Drill Through Page in Power BI

Power BI is brilliant at summarizing complex data into high-level dashboards, but real insight often lies in the details. The drill-through feature is your key to unlocking those details, letting you and your users move seamlessly from a high-level summary to a granular, focused report. This guide will walk you through exactly how to create a drill-through page in your Power BI reports.

What Exactly is a Drill-Through Page in Power BI?

A drill-through page is a dedicated "destination" or detail report page you create. Users access it by right-clicking on a specific data point from a visual on your main "source" page. When they do this, they "drill through" to the destination page, which automatically filters to show only the information related to the data point they selected.

Imagine you have a summary report with a bar chart showing total sales by country. An executive might look at the chart and see that the United States is the top-performing region. Instead of having to find a separate report or manually apply filters, they can simply right-click on the "USA" bar, choose "Drill through," and be taken to a detailed page showing sales trends, top-selling products, and regional P&L - exclusively for the USA. It's a clean, intuitive way to navigate from A to B and explore data layers effectively.

Why Should You Use Drill-Through? The Key Benefits

Implementing drill-through pages isn't just a fancy trick, it fundamentally improves your reports. A few key benefits include:

Reduced Dashboard Clutter: One of the biggest challenges in dashboard design is balancing high-level information with necessary details. Drill-through lets you keep your main dashboards clean and focused on key performance indicators (KPIs), while making granular data accessible just a click away.
Enhanced User Experience: Drill-through provides a guided analytics path. It's far more user-friendly than asking your audience to navigate complex slicer and filter panes. You create an intuitive experience where users can naturally explore questions as they arise from the summary data.
Provides Deep Context: Because the drill-through page is automatically filtered by the user's selection, the insights are highly contextual. Users don't just see a generic "Sales Detail" report, they see a "Sales Detail" report specifically about the product, region, or time period they are investigating.

Step-by-Step Guide: How to Create Your Drill-Through Page

Creating a drill-through experience involves setting up a "destination" page and then linking it from visuals on a "source" page. Let's break down the process step-by-step.

Step 1: Create and Design Your "Destination" Report Page

First, you need to build the page that will contain the detailed information. Think of this as the answer to the questions your summary charts will raise.

Create a new page in your Power BI report. Give it a descriptive name, like "Sales Detail by Country" or "Product Performance Drill." It's a good practice to hide this page from the standard navigation by right-clicking the page tab and selecting "Hide Page." You want users to access it via drill-through, not by randomly clicking through tabs.
Populate this page with the visuals you want to show for a specific slice of data. For our "Sales Detail by Country" example, you might add:
- Cards showing Total Sales, Total Profit, and Number of Orders for the selected country.
- A line chart showing sales trends over time.
- A table showing the top 10 products sold.
- A bar chart breaking down sales by city or state within that country.

At this stage, the page will show unfiltered data for all countries combined. Don't worry, the magic happens in the next step.

Step 2: Add Your Drill-Through Field

This is the critical step where you officially designate your new page as a drill-through target and tell Power BI how it should be filtered.

With your destination page ("Sales Detail by Country") selected, click on an empty space on the canvas to ensure no visuals are selected.
Look at the Visualizations pane. Scroll down to the bottom where you'll see a section called Drill through.
From your Fields pane, find the field that you want to serve as the filter. In our example, this would be the Country field. Drag the Country field and drop it into the "Add drill-through fields here" well.

As soon as you do this, two things happen:

A "Back" Button Appears: Power BI automatically adds a small back arrow icon to the top-left of your page. This button is pre-programmed to take users back to the page they came from. You can move this button, resize it, or even format it with your own image or text in its formatting options.
The Drill-Through Connection is Made: The page is now officially a drill-through destination for any visual using the Country field.

A Quick Note on "Keep All Filters"

Directly under the drill-through well where you dropped your field, you'll see a toggle for "Keep all filters." Here's what it does:

On (Default): This passes the context of the source visual—including any other filters or slicers affecting it on that page—to your drill-through page. For example, if your source page was already filtered for "2023" and you drill through on "USA," the detail page will be filtered for "USA" AND "2023." This is usually what you want.
Off: This only passes the filter from the specific field you clicked on (e.g., "USA") and ignores any other filters that were active on the source page.

Step 3: Define Your "Source" Visual

Now, go back to your main summary report page (the source). On this page, you need a visual that uses the same field you set up in the drill-through well.

Create a visual, for instance, a Bar Chart.
Use the Country field for the axis and your Total Sales measure for the values.

That's it! Because this bar chart uses the Country field, and your "Sales Detail by Country" page is listening for that field, Power BI has automatically connected them.

Step 4: Use the Drill-Through in Action

It's time to test your setup. The process differs slightly between Power BI Desktop and the published Power BI service.

In Power BI Desktop: Hold down the Ctrl key, then right-click on one of the bars in your chart (e.g., the bar for "Canada").
In Power BI Service (online): Simply right-click on the bar.

A context menu will appear. You will now see an option that says "Drill through," with an arrow next to it. Hover over it, and you'll see the name of your destination page: "Sales Detail by Country." Click on it.

You’ll be instantly transported to your detail page, and all the visuals on that page will be filtered to show data only for "Canada." Success!

Advanced Tips for Better Drill-Throughs

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

1. Create Measure-Specific Tooltips

Sometimes you don’t need to see the drill-through option every time you right-click. You can configure your drill-through to only appear when a user is interested in a specific measure.

On your destination page, in the Visualizations pane, set the Use as a drill-through destination by dropdown from "Categorical" to a specific measure, such as Total Profit. Now, the drill-through option will only appear on visuals on the source page that include the Total Profit measure in them. This is great for making your dashboard actions feel even more relevant for financial analysts on your team.

2. Drill Through with Multiple Fields

You can create more specific drill-through experiences by adding more than one field to the well. For instance, on your "Sales Detail" page, you could add both Country and Product Category to the drill-through well.

For this to work, the source visual needs to incorporate both of those fields. For example, a Matrix table with Countries as rows and Product Categories as columns would let you right-click the intersection of "USA" and "Bikes" and drill down to a page showing extremely specific details.

3. Use DAX for Custom Back Button Text

Instead of just a "Back" button, you can create a dynamic button title. First, create a simple DAX measure that captures the selected value:

Back Button Text = "Back to " & SELECTEDVALUE('Sales'[Country], "Summary")

Then, on your destination page, add a button. In the button’s Format options under "Button Text," use the conditional formatting (fx button) to set the text based on your Back Button Text measure. Now, when a user drills through on "Germany," the button will dynamically change to say "Back to Germany."

Final Thoughts

Drill-through in Power BI transforms static dashboards into interactive analytical tools. By creating a clear path from high-level summaries to detailed reports, you empower users to explore their data, ask follow-up questions, and find the specific answers they need without getting lost.

For marketing and sales teams trying to connect data across many tools, the setup can sometimes feel overwhelming. Instead of spending hours learning DAX or manually building complex drill-through paths, with Graphed we're working to eliminate that manual effort. You simply connect your data sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, or Salesforce once and then use natural language to ask for the data visualizations you need. We handle the technical side of creating real-time visual reports so you can focus on making data-driven decisions that will grow your business.