How to Reset Drill Through in Power BI

Drilling through your Power BI reports is a powerful way to explore data, but getting back to your original summary view isn't always as simple as it sounds. You’ve followed a data point to a detailed page, and now you want a clean, simple way to "reset" the view and return to the main dashboard. This tutorial will show you exactly how to create a custom, user-friendly reset and back button system for your drill-through pages.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

We’ll cover the default back functionality and then dive into a much better, more flexible method using bookmarks. You'll learn how to build an intuitive navigation experience that makes your reports easier for everyone to use.

What is Drill Through in Power BI?

Before we build a reset button, let’s quickly cover what drill through is and why it's so useful. In Power BI, drill through allows you to create a "target" page in your report that focuses on a specific entity, like a supplier, customer, or product. From a summary page, users can right-click on a data point (like a bar on a chart or a row in a table) and jump to that target page. The key is that the target page is automatically filtered to show details related to only the data point they selected.

For example, you might have a main sales-summary page showing total revenue by product category. By setting up drill through, a user could:

• See a bar for "Electronics" showing $500,000 in revenue.
• Right-click on that "Electronics" bar.
• Select "Drill through" to a "Product Details" page.
• The "Product Details" page would instantly be filtered to display specific sales data, customer trends, and inventory information just for products in the "Electronics" category.

This creates a layered, exploratory experience where users can move from a high-level overview to granular details without needing complex slicers and filters for every possible question.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

The Challenge: “Resetting” the Drill-Through View

The problem arises after the user has drilled through. They are now on a detailed, filtered page. How do they easily get back to the unfiltered summary page? Power BI does provide a small, default "Back" arrow icon that appears in the top-left corner of the report after a drill-through action. While this works, it has a few drawbacks:

• It's not obvious: It's a small, subtle icon that end-users, especially those less familiar with Power BI, often overlook entirely.
• It's not customizable: You can't change its appearance, text, or position. It doesn’t feel like part of your tailored report design.
• It doesn't "reset" slicers: It simply takes you back one step. It doesn't reset other filters the user might have applied on the summary page before drilling through.

The goal is to provide a clear, unmistakable button that says "Go Back" or "Return to Summary," and gives you full control over the reset behavior. The best way to achieve this is with bookmarks.

Method 1: Using the Default Back Button (The Simple Way)

Let's first acknowledge the built-in functionality. Power BI's default navigation is designed to handle this basic flow. After a user drills through from a source page to a destination page, the report canvas automatically displays a small, left-pointing arrow in the header.

How it Works:

1. On your summary page, a user right-clicks a visual and selects drill through.
2. They land on the detailed drill-through page.
3. A back arrow icon appears in the top-left corner of the report header.
4. Clicking this arrow takes them directly back to the previous page (the summary page).

When to use this: This method is perfectly fine for personal reports, quick analyses, or situations where all your users are experienced with Power BI and know to look for this little arrow. However, for reports built for a wider business audience, providing a custom, more intuitive option is almost always the better choice.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

Method 2: Create a Custom "Back" Button with Bookmarks

This is the most common, flexible, and user-friendly solution. We are going to create a bookmark that "saves" the state of your summary page and then assign that bookmark as an action to a custom button on your drill-through page.

Step 1: Set Up Your Drill Through Page

First, make sure your drill-through functionality is set up correctly. Select your detail page (the one users will land on). In the Format Pane for that page, find the Page information card and toggle Allow drill through to "On". Then, drag the field you want to drill by into the Drill through well. For our example, this would be the ‘Product Category’ field.

Step 2: Create a Bookmark for the Summary Page

Now, let's create the bookmark that will serve as our "reset" destination.

1. Navigate to your main summary page (the page users drill through from).
2. Ensure the page is in the default state you want users to return to. For now, this just means being on the page itself.
3. Go to the View tab in the ribbon and click Bookmarks to open the Bookmarks pane.
4. With your summary page selected, click Add in the Bookmarks pane. A new bookmark will appear.
5. Rename this bookmark to something descriptive, like "Return to Summary Page" or "Main Dashboard View".
6. Click the ellipsis (...) next to the bookmark name and, for now, uncheck "Data". This is important. Unchecking "Data" means the bookmark will only navigate to the page without affecting any slicers or filters the user may have set. We will revisit this in the next method for more advanced control.

Your bookmark is now set. It has saved a link to this page without its data state - exactly what we need for a simple back button.

Step 3: Add a Custom Button to Your Drill Through Page

Next, we’ll create the clickable button that users will interact with.

1. Go to your drill-through detail page.
2. Go to the Insert tab in the ribbon.
3. Click on Buttons and select a button type. The "Back" button (which has a left-arrow icon already) is a great choice, but you can also use a blank button and add your own text or icons.
4. Position the button somewhere intuitive on your report, like the top-left corner.

Step 4: Assign the Bookmark Action to Your Button

This final step connects the button to the bookmark you created.

1. Select the new button on your canvas.
2. With the button selected, go to the Format pane.
3. Find the Action card and toggle it to "On".
4. Expand the Action card. Set the Type to Bookmark.
5. In the Bookmark dropdown, select the bookmark you created earlier ("Return to Summary Page").
6. You can also add optional text in the Tooltip field, like "Click to return to the main sales summary". This text will appear when a user hovers over the button.

Step 5: Test Your New Reset Button

Now, let's test the complete workflow:

1. Go to your summary page.
2. Right-click a data point and drill through to your detail page.
3. On the detail page, you should see your new custom back button.
4. Hold down Ctrl and click the button (in Power BI Desktop, you need Ctrl + Click to activate buttons). In the Power BI Service, a single click will work.

It should take you right back to your summary page, successfully "resetting" the drill-through view in a clean and intuitive way!

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

Method 3: Create a Button That Resets Slicers Too

What if you want the "Back" button to not only return to the main dashboard but also reset all the slicers and filters on that page to their default state? The bookmark configuration makes this easy.

The key here is that "Data" checkbox we deselected earlier when creating the bookmark.

How to Configure a Full Reset Bookmark:

1. Navigate back to your summary page.
2. Manually reset all slicers and filters to the default view you want your users to land on. For example, make sure no regions are selected, date ranges are reset, and any product filters are cleared. This is the visual state your bookmark will capture.
3. Open the Bookmarks pane.
4. Find your existing summary page bookmark, or create a new one for this purpose (e.g., "Return and Reset Summary").
5. With the page in its fully reset state, click the ellipsis (...) next to the bookmark name and click Update.
6. Now, the important part: click the ellipsis (...) again and make sure the Data option is checked.

By saving the bookmark with the 'Data' option enabled, you've saved a snapshot of the page's entire state - including the current (cleared) values of all slicers. Now, when a user clicks your back button, it will perform the navigation and apply the saved data state, effectively resetting the entire page.

Final Thoughts

Creating an intuitive reporting experience is just as important as the data itself. While Power BI's default drill-through functionality is powerful, adding a custom reset button using bookmarks can dramatically improve usability. This simple technique gives your users a clear, guided path to navigate through your data, making your reports more professional and approachable for everyone.

The time spent manually configuring dashboards in tools like Power BI to get the user experience just right is something we are passionate about solving. We built Graphed because we believe gaining insights shouldn’t require you to be a BI developer. You can connect your marketing and sales data sources and instantly create entire real-time dashboards by describing what you want in plain English. This lets you focus on the story your data is telling, rather than getting stuck managing button actions and page navigation.