How to Update Bookmarks in Power BI

Bookmarks are one of Power BI's most powerful features for creating interactive stories and guided navigation in your reports. But as your reports change - with new visuals, updated filters, or a shift in focus - your bookmarks can quickly become outdated. This guide will walk you through exactly how to update bookmarks in Power BI, ensuring your reports always behave as you intend.

A Quick Refresher: What Do Power BI Bookmarks Actually Do?

Before we dive into updating them, let's quickly recap what a bookmark captures. Think of a bookmark not just as a link to a page, but as a saved "state" of a report page. When you create a bookmark, you’re saving a snapshot of:

• Filters and Slicers: The specific values selected in the Filters pane and on any slicer visuals.
• Visual States: The sort order of a table, the drill-down level of a matrix, or the focused state of a chart.
• Object Visibility: Which charts, images, or text boxes are visible or hidden on the page at that moment.

This functionality is what allows you to create custom navigation, tell a data story step-by-step, or simply save useful filter combinations for your end-users. But when the report's design evolves, these saved states need to be updated to match.

Why Bookmarks Even Need Updating

Your Power BI reports aren’t static. They grow and adapt based on new business questions, additional data, and user feedback. When these changes happen, your bookmarks must be updated to reflect them. Otherwise, clicking a bookmark could result in broken or confusing user experiences.

Here are a few common scenarios where an update is necessary:

• Adding New Visuals: If you add a new chart to a page, your existing bookmarks won't "know" about it. When a user clicks an old bookmark, your new visual might disappear because it wasn't part of the original saved "state."
• Changing Report Filters: Perhaps you've changed a slicer from a single-select to a multi-select or added a new page-level filter. Bookmarks need to be taught these new filter conditions.
• Modifying Visual Layouts: If you move, resize, or replace a visual, the old bookmark doesn't automatically recognize this. It might still be trying to show the visual in its old position or state.
• Refining the Narrative: The story you want to tell with your data might change. An old bookmark might highlight last year's trends, but you now need it to reflect this quarter’s performance instead.

Ignoring these updates can lead to confusion. A user might click a button linked to a bookmark and see a new visual vanish, or see outdated filters applied, completely undermining trust in the report.

How to Update a Bookmark in Power BI: A Step-by-Step Guide

Updating a bookmark is straightforward once you know the process. It's less about creating something new and more about re-teaching an existing bookmark what to remember. Follow these steps carefully.

Step 1: Get Your Workspace Ready by Opening the Correct Panes

First, you need the right tools visible. Go to the View tab in the Power BI Desktop ribbon. From there, make sure you check the boxes to open two crucial panes:

• Bookmarks Pane: This is where all your bookmarks are listed. You'll use this to select and update the specific bookmark you want to change.
• Selection Pane: This pane lists every single object on your report page (visuals, shapes, text boxes, buttons, etc.). You use it to control the visibility of each object. This is essential for ensuring new visuals don't disappear when a bookmark is activated.

Having both of these open side-by-side will make the update process much smoother.

Step 2: Set the Stage for Your Updated Bookmark

Now, meticulously set up the report page exactly how you want it to look when the user clicks the bookmark. This is the most important part of the process.

• Adjust Filters and Slicers: Apply every filter exactly as you need it. If the bookmark is for "Q3 Sales," make sure the date slicer is set to Q3 and any other relevant filters (like product category or region) are selected.
• Set Visual States: If you want a table sorted by revenue in descending order, do it now. If a chart should be drilled down to the city level, drill down.
• Configure Visibility in the Selection Pane: This is the step people often forget. Look at the list of objects in your Selection pane. Next to each item is an "eye" icon. If the eye is visible, the object is shown. If it has a slash through it, the object is hidden. Go through this list and ensure every visual you want to appear in the bookmarked view has the eye icon enabled. If you recently added a new chart, you must make sure it’s visible here before you update the bookmark.

Take your time with this step. Every single detail on the page - every filter, every sort order, every visible object - is what the bookmark will remember.

Step 3: Update the Correct Bookmark

With your report page perfectly configured, it's time to save this new state to your existing bookmark.

In the Bookmarks pane, find the bookmark you want to update. Do not just click on it, as that will revert the page back to its old state, undoing all the hard work you just did in Step 2.

Instead, hover your cursor over the bookmark's name. A three-dot menu icon (ellipsis ...) will appear. Click on it, and a small context menu will pop up. From this menu, simply click Update.

That's it! Power BI has now overwritten the bookmark's old state with the new one you just configured on the page. There's no confirmation dialog, the update happens instantly.

Common Mistake: A frequent error is clicking "Add" a new bookmark instead of clicking "Update". This creates a duplicate bookmark ("Bookmark 1") and leaves the old, incorrect bookmark linked to your buttons and navigation, causing ongoing confusion.

Step 4: Test, Test, and Test Again

Never assume an update worked perfectly. You need to test it from a user's perspective.

1. First, change the state of the report page. Select different filters, sort a table a different way, or click on a different bookmark.
2. Now, click on the bookmark you just updated.
3. Verify that the page snaps back to the exact state you configured in Step 2. Do all the correct filters apply? Is the right chart visible? Is the table sorted correctly?

Testing ensures there are no surprises for your end-users and confirms that your guided analytics experience works flawlessly.

Best Practices for Managing Your Power BI Bookmarks

Keeping bookmarks updated is part of a larger strategy of keeping your reports clean, organized, and easy to maintain. Here are a few best practices to adopt.

Use Descriptive Names

Avoid generic names like "Bookmark 1" or "View 2." Name your bookmarks based on what they do. For example:

• Sales Overview - Top Products
• HR Dashboard - Headcount by Department
• Show Filter Pane / Hide Filter Pane

Descriptive naming makes it much easier to manage your report, especially when you come back to it months later or hand it over to a colleague.

Group Related Bookmarks

If you have a set of bookmarks that serve a similar function (e.g., they act as the navigation for a single section of visuals), you can group them. In the Bookmarks pane, select the bookmarks you want to group (using Ctrl+Click), then right-click and choose Group. This creates a folder-like structure, collapsing clutter and making your list of bookmarks much easier to navigate.

Understand Bookmark Properties (Data vs. Display)

In the bookmark's ellipsis (...) menu, you'll notice options for "Data," "Display," and "Current Page." By default, a bookmark captures everything. However, you can make them more specific. For example:

• Unchecking Data means the bookmark will only affect the display (like object visibility) and won't change any current filters. This is useful for creating "pop-up" help windows that appear without disturbing the user's filter selections.
• Unchecking Display means the bookmark will only apply filters and won't affect which objects are visible.

While most updates will affect all properties, understanding these options gives you more granular control for advanced interactions.

Final Thoughts

Mastering bookmarks is essential for elevating a decent report into an intuitive, story-driven analytics tool. As we've seen, updating them is a simple but critical maintenance task. By setting up your page state, carefully managing visibility in the Selection pane, and using the "Update" command, you can ensure your reports remain dynamic and reliable guides for your users.

Manually updating report states is a fundamental part of traditional BI. However, building and maintaining these interactive views is often where users spend the most time - time that could be spent on strategy. Here at Graphed, we took a different approach. Instead of clicking through menus and panes to set up a view, you can just ask for it in plain English. For example, asking "Show me last quarter's sales by region but only for the new product line" instantly generates the view for you, letting you focus on the insight, not the setup.