Using Bookmarks to Show and Hide Visuals in Power BI Desktop

Use bookmarks to toggle visuals in your Power BI reports

In this video, you will learn about how to utilize bookmarks in Power BI to show and hide visuals. Matt will teach you how to set them up and create a smooth user experience to toggle between visuals on a report page.

Hi, this is Matt with Playfair+. In today’s video, I’m going to show you one of my favorite techniques in Power BI, how to use bookmarks to show and hide information. So this is a way that you can put additional data on a limited amount of space, and it’s something that I use in almost every single one of my reports.

So I’m excited to share this with you and I hope you can learn some bookmark techniques with me today. So let’s dive in. Right now we’ve got some that are on screen that are really great to see. But if you wanted to say you wanted to look at category and country, and you wanted to look at a date range and you wanted to look at color.

So if we’re getting into a really, a huge number of slicers that you couldn’t fit altogether, maybe what you would need to do then is build out, the show/hide option of, you would want to build like a custom text box, that would say like Slicer Panel Show/Hide. So I’m going to build this out.

if I could spell correctly, and I’ll do this real quick before we move on to our DAX. so we’ve got this option. Let’s see here. Our text box, what on earth did I just do?

Slicer, Show/Hide. Let’s go Effects, Background color. We’ll make this gray. So if you want to stack all your slicers, you could do this with an action button where you would essentially reveal your slicers to be, through, a button action. And this would be done through bookmarks. So, and maybe I should just demonstrate it this way.

So we’ve got a bookmark here, so. And we’re going to say Title on, we’re going to say Show Slicers and I will make this a little bigger so that it actually fits all on this. So this is our Show Slicers option. And golly, I don’t like the way I’ve organized this in real time, but what we’re going to do with our Show Slicers button, and I’ll just do it to actually hide the two that are existing. I was going to get too complicated with this otherwise. So we’re going to Show Slicers and then I’m going to have one that is Hide Slicers.

And what we would do, and you don’t have to use the actual bookmark, shape or button option for this, you can do it however you like. I just chose that one because it’s easy. And if you’re new to this, it’s going to be something that you will probably go default to. So the way we’re going to do this is we’re going to have an action.

And these are going to take you to a specific bookmark. So. We need to have our Bookmarks pane built. That’s under View. And then we have bookmarks. The other one we’re going to use is Selection. So we need to have all these up. And I know it really shrinks the page down when we do this, so, maybe we’ll hide our data and our visualizations and our filter pane.

So now we’re looking at our Selection and we’re looking at our Bookmarks. So, alright, we’re going to, we have everything on screen right now. We’re going to add a bookmark. And this bookmark is, we’re going to call, this one is going to be, Show Slicers and we’re good to go. We can update it. It affects everything.

This is great. Now we also want to add another bookmark, and to do that, what we’re going to do is we are going to add a bookmark. We’re going to call this Hide Slicers.

And what we want to hide is the two slicers on our screen. So imagine these are in a dropdown box, but right now we’re just going to hide them. And you can see that they’re gone. They’re not on screen. And what we would do then for our bookmarks is we’re going to go back to Hide Slicer and we’re going to update.

So now you can see if I click on the Show Slicer bookmark, they’re there. Hide, Slicer bookmark, they’re not there. And now what we need to do is link our actions, and our actions are on, it’s going to be what bookmark is our Show Slicer going to, it’s going to be Show Slicer. And then what bookmark action are we going to take for the Hide Slicer button? It’s going to be hide slicers.

So now that we have these selected, I can Ctrl+Click on the Show Slicer and it’ll take us, you can see our slicers appeared. If I Ctrl+Click on Hide Slicer, they disappear. The next really cool thing you could do with something like this is Add Hide and Show Slicer to the bookmarks.

So I’m on Hide Slicer right now. That means I’ve selected the Hide Slicer option. And then what I want to see is Show Slicers as my trade out. So if I’ve selected the Hide Slicer, I’m going to update this, and then I’m going to Ctrl+Click Show Slicers and they all show up. And then now I’m going to hide this visual and update. Show Slicers.

I think I did this in the correct order. Then I could drop these on top of each other. And then, so you can see I’m going to Ctrl+Click and I’d have to make sure I put them in the same location. But what would happen is it would essentially be the same button. And let’s see here, let’s go to Format, General, Properties.

You can see the Position, so. Let’s go 1140, 25. That’s easy enough to remember, and then Hide, let’s click on Show Slicers now. Hide Slicers, let’s make sure we’re looking at 1140, 25.

You kind of see, let’s see here. If I make these the exact same, what would happen is, I’m clicking on one and it’s going to hide the slicer. If I click on the other, it shows. So you’re using, the button action and the navigation, to go ahead and change the view, based on this, so. We have a dedicated spot for our slicers in this view.

if you wanted to put them in a show/hide container, and Tableau would be the good example of like, you can stack all these off-screen, have them drop over as an overlay on your dashboard, and then you can save some space. Maybe you needed to show six or seven KPIs on the left-hand side.

We no longer have space for our slicer panels. We can go ahead and put those in a small container, hide them when they’re not in use, reveal them when we do want to use them, and then go forward from there. So.

This has been Matt with Playfair+. Thanks for watching and make sure you bookmark this video. Thanks.