What Are Drill Through Fields in Power BI?

You’ve spent hours building the perfect Power BI summary dashboard. It’s clean, insightful, and beautifully designed. But the first thing your boss does is point to a single number - say, last quarter's sales - and ask, "Great, but what specific products are driving this number?" Suddenly, your high-level overview feels incomplete. This exact scenario is why Power BI's drill-through feature exists. It allows you and your team to navigate from a summary visual to a detailed page, making your reports interactive and deeply analytical. This guide will walk you through what drill-through is and how you can set it up to transform your static dashboards into dynamic exploration tools.

So, What Exactly IS a Power BI Drill Through?

Think of drill-through like browsing a website. You start on a homepage with broad categories (the "summary" report). When you want more information on a specific topic, you click a link and are taken to a new page filled with specific details (the "detail" report). That's precisely what drill-through does for your data.

In Power BI terms, drill-through lets you create a dedicated "destination" page in your report that focuses on a specific entity, like a product, a customer, or a sales region. Then, from a "source" page, you can right-click a data point (like a bar on a chart or a state on a map) and "drill through" to that destination page. The magic is that Power BI automatically filters the destination page to show information only for the data point you selected back on the source page.

For example, if you right-click on "California" on a US sales map and drill through, you'll land on a detailed page showing only California’s sales data, top customers, and product performance. It's a clean and intuitive way to provide layered information without cluttering a single screen.

Why Drill-Through is a Game-Changer for Your Reports

Sure, it sounds neat, but a well-implemented drill-through strategy can fundamentally change how people use your reports. It moves them from being passive viewers to active explorers.

1. It Keeps Your Dashboards Clean and Focused

One of the biggest mistakes in dashboard design is trying to shoehorn too much information onto one page. The result is often a cluttered, confusing interface that overwhelms users. Drill-through solves this by separating the summary from the details. Your main dashboard can remain a high-level, at-a-glance view of key metrics. The granular details are always just a click away, available when needed but hidden when they're not.

2. It Creates an Intuitive User Experience

The "click for more details" concept is universally understood. People have been doing it on the web for decades. By incorporating drill-through, you build an analytics experience that feels natural. Users don’t need a manual or a training session, they can intuitively right-click and explore. This encourages self-service analytics, where team members can find answers to their own questions without needing to ask the report builder for help.

3. It Empowers Your Team to Answer Their "Why"

A summary dashboard is great for showing you what happened. A drill-through report helps you understand why it happened. When your marketing manager sees an unexpected spike in website traffic from a certain country on a summary chart, they don't have to send you an email asking for a deeper dive. They can simply drill through on that country to see the specific landing pages, traffic sources, and conversion rates that contributed to the spike. This speeds up the feedback loop from data to insight to action.

Setting Up Your First Power BI Drill-Through: A Step-by-Step Guide

Let's walk through building a simple drill-through enabled report. We'll use a common sales data scenario: we have a main dashboard with sales by product category and want to drill through to a detail page showing performance for a specific category.

Step 1: Create Your Source and Destination Pages

First, you need at least two pages in your Power BI report.

• Source Page: Name one page "Sales Summary". This page will contain your high-level visuals. For our example, create a simple bar chart that shows Total Sales by Product Category.
• Destination Page: Create a second page and name it "Category Details". This page will contain our granular information. Add some visuals like a table showing sales by individual Product Name, another chart showing sales by Country, and maybe a card visual for Total Profit.

Right now, these two pages are completely disconnected. The "Category Details" page shows totals for everything. Our next step is to link them.

Step 2: Add the Drill-Through Field to Your Destination Page

This is where the connection is made. The key is in the "Drill through" section of the Visualizations pane.

1. Navigate to your destination page (the "Category Details" page).
2. Make sure you don't have any visuals selected. Just click on the blank page canvas.
3. In the Visualizations pane, look towards the bottom. You will see a section labeled "Drill through."
4. From your Fields pane, find the field that connects your two pages. In our case, it's Product Category.
5. Drag the Product Category field into the "Drill through" box.

As soon as you do this, two things happen. First, the Keep all filters toggle appears. It's usually best to leave this on, as it ensures that any other filters on the source page (like a date slicer) also get passed to the destination page. Second, Power BI automatically adds a "back" button (a left-pointing arrow) to your destination page. This button is what users will click to return to their original source page.

Step 3: Test Your Drill-Through

Now for the fun part. Let's see your setup in action.

1. Navigate back to your "Sales Summary" page.
2. On your bar chart of sales by product category, hover over one of the bars.
3. Right-click the bar. A context menu will appear. You'll now see a "Drill through" option with an arrow pointing to "Category Details."
4. Click on Category Details.

Just like that, you are taken to the "Category Details" page. Notice that all the visuals on this page - the product table, the country chart, and the profit card - are all filtered down to show data only for the product category you clicked on. You just enabled your first drill-through!

Bonus Tip: Create a Drill-Through Button for Better UX

Right-clicking isn't always obvious to every user. Power BI allows you to create a button that makes the drill-through action much more visible.

1. Go to your source page (the "Sales Summary" page).
2. In the top ribbon, go to Insert > Buttons > Blank. A blank button will appear on your page.
3. Select the new button. In the Format pane, find the "Action" section and turn it on.
4. Set the "Type" to Drill through.
5. Set the "Destination" to your Category Details page.
6. You can add text in the "Button Text" section, like "See Category Details".

You'll notice the button is grayed out. It will only become clickable when a user selects a single product category on the bar chart. It’s a dynamic and user-friendly way to guide your audience through the report.

Advanced Tips for Your Drill-Throughs

Once you’ve mastered the basics, here are a few ideas to take your interactive reporting to the next level.

Cross-Report Drill-Through

Did you know you can drill through to a completely different report? As long as reports are published to the same Power BI workspace and share the same data model, you can set up a "cross-report" drill-through. On the destination report page, you simply toggle on the "Cross-report" switch in the Drill through pane. This is powerful for organizations that want to maintain a centralized, highly detailed report while providing various departments with smaller, more focused summary reports that all link back to that master detail view.

Customize the Back Button

You’re not stuck with that default back arrow. Select the back button and go to its Format options. You can change everything from the icon shape and color to the tooltip text that appears when a user hovers over it. You can even use your own custom image. A company logo, for example, makes a great custom back button that aligns with your branding.

Leverage Drill-Through and Slicers

Remember that "Keep all filters" toggle? This is where it shines. Imagine your source page has a user-selectable date slicer set to "Last 30 Days." When a user drills through on a product category, the destination report will be filtered for BOTH the specific category they clicked AND the Last 30 Days. This makes the contextual analysis incredibly powerful without requiring the user to apply filters on multiple pages.

Final Thoughts

Drill-through is one of those simple but profound features that separates a static report from a true business intelligence tool. By creating clean, layered reports, you empower your team to explore data, answer their own follow-up questions, and move from looking at data to actually using it to make decisions.

Of course, setting up filters, pages, and interactive fields in tools like Power BI is still a manual process that takes time to learn and build. If you need powerful reports, but don't want to get lost in setup panes and formatting options, we've designed Graphed to streamline this entire workflow. You can just connect your sources and create dashboards in plain English. For instance, you could ask, "show me a bar chart of sales by product category" and get your visual instantly. Then you can simply follow up with, "now show me the sales data for just the 'Electronics' category," getting the answers you need in seconds instead of designing pages.