Power BI Navigator - Better Bookmarks Experience
In the blog Use bookmarks to create buttons for different visualizations, I described how to create a feel of multiple tabs within a report page in Power BI. For your convenience, here’s the TLDR from the blog:
TLDR
Create all the visualizations you want to put in one page.
Use the Selection pane to make certain visualizations visible and invisible.
When you have a “tab” view you want, add a bookmark.
Create a button and put action as the bookmark.
Now, with the new function “Navigator” in Power BI, the step 4 can be done with a couple of clicks instead of making each button and setting them up which can take much time not to mention is tedious (if you look at the previous blog post, you will see the step 4 takes most of the blog post!). Before we jump in, if you do not know how to follow step 1~3 above, then please go to the blog and read & follow the instructions. In this current blog, I will only deal with step 4.
Navigators - How to
Where is the navigator? You can find it under Insert: Insert > Buttons > Navigator.
Here, you will see page navigator, which you can use if you want to create buttons for each page, and also see bookmark navigator, which is what we will use in this blog.
Since you already created multiple visualizations and bookmarked them (again, you can refer back to the previous blog post if you do not know how), when you click bookmark navigator, it will immediately show all the bookmarks as a row of buttons. Here’s an example screenshot:
So instead of tediously making each button, now it’s all made for you! Not to mention, it already has a default setting for: default state, On hover state, and Selected state. As you can see, the default state is white background, while On hover, the fill color gets slightly darker, and when selected, it is filled in black with white text. All these default settings already save you a ton of time.
Make sure you Ctrl + button click to test the buttons! And you are done!
Q&A Section for more information
Q. What if I want different styles?
You can absolutely do so! Click the navigator and you can change the font, fill color, or outline for your liking per state, and it will change for all the buttons, so again, you are saving your precious time. Here’s an example screenshot of changing “Selected state” fill color to orange:
Q. What if I want to change the order of the bookmark in the navigator?
You can do so by dragging the bookmark up or down in the bookmark pane. Let’s say you want to see Bookmark 1 2 3 and then Bookmark 6,4,5 — I know, it’s very random but it will give you a good idea. You go to the Bookmark pane and drag Bookmark 6 up and 5 down and it will look like this:
Q. What if I want to show only a few of the bookmarks in a specific page?
Great question – so what if you want to create a navigator only for bookmarks 3 ~ 6 and not show bookmarks 1 and 2? You can use “Group” to do that. First, go to the bookmark pane. You will see all the bookmarks you created in the report. Now, multi select (using Ctrl) the bookmarks you want to show. Then right click and select “Group”.
Now it will show up as Group 1 with a drop down function. Feel free to rename it by right clicking or double clicking. I will leave mine as Group 1 for now.
Ok, now let’s go back to the navigator. Click the bookmark navigator and see the format options on the right. You will see an option for “Bookmarks”. Open the option and you will see the drop down available for you where you can either select “All” the bookmarks or “Group 1” which is the group of bookmarks you just created. Click “Group 1”.
Now you will see that your Bookmark Navigator is only showing Group 1.
Comments