Interactive Reports: Drillthrough, Tooltips, Bookmarks and Parameters

A basic report shows data. An advanced report lets people have a conversation with it: the sales VP sees a region slipping, right-clicks and jumps to that region's detail; hovers over a product and sees its trend; switches from "Sales" to "Gross Profit" with one button. In this lesson, which opens the Advanced level, you'll learn the tools that create that experience without crowding the page with charts.

1. Hierarchies
2. Drillthrough
3. Tooltips
4. Bookmarks
5. Parameters

Hierarchies and drill down

A hierarchy groups related columns into levels: Year → Quarter → Month, Category → Brand → Product, or Region → City → Customer. To create one, right-click Category in the Data pane › Create hierarchy, then drag Brand and Product into it.

When you put a hierarchy on a chart's axis, arrows appear at the top of the visual:

Drillthrough

Drillthrough lets users jump from any chart to a detail page filtered to the item they chose. Example: from the summary, right-click "Atlanta" › Drill through › "City detail" page, which shows only Atlanta.

1. Create a new page, "City detail", with the detail visuals (reps, products, customers, trend).
2. In that page's Visualizations pane, drag the City field into the Drill through well.
3. Power BI adds a Back button to the top-left corner automatically.
4. Hide the page so it can only be reached from charts.

Now any chart in the report that uses City shows Drill through › City detail on right-click.

Report page tooltips

Hovering over a chart element shows a box with its values. You can replace it with a mini page of its own visuals:

1. Create a new page. Under Format page › Page information, turn on Allow use as tooltip.
2. Under Canvas settings, choose the Tooltip type (a small size).
3. Add 2 or 3 visuals: for example, the 12-month trend and gross margin %.
4. On the main chart, open the Format pane and go to General › Tooltips, set Type to Report page and select your page.

Now hovering over a product's bar shows its monthly trend. It's an elegant way to offer detail without using up space.

Bookmarks, buttons and the Selection pane

A bookmark saves a page's state: filters, slicers, which visuals are visible or hidden, sort order. Paired with buttons, it lets you build alternate views on the same page.

Example: toggle between a bar chart and a table in the same spot.

1. Place the chart and the table on top of each other, the same size.
2. Open View › Selection: you'll see every object on the page with an eye icon to show or hide it.
3. Hide the table. Open View › Bookmarks and add a "Chart view" bookmark. In its options, turn off "Data" so it doesn't store filters (and doesn't "freeze" the user's selections).
4. Hide the chart, show the table and add a "Table view" bookmark.
5. Insert two buttons ("Chart" and "Table") and set each one's Action to type Bookmark with the matching bookmark.

You can also use a bookmark navigator (Insert › Buttons › Navigator), which creates the buttons for you, or use bookmarks to walk an audience through a story in a presentation.

Drillthrough, tooltip or bookmark?

Field parameters: users choose what to see

With Modeling › New parameter › Fields you create a list of columns or measures that users pick from with a slicer. For example, a "Metric" parameter with Total Sales, Gross Profit and Units: the user chooses "Gross Profit" and every chart that uses the parameter shows gross profit. It works for dimensions too: a "View by" parameter with Region, Category and SalesRep turns one chart into three different analyses.

Numeric parameters: "what if" scenarios

With Modeling › New parameter › Numeric range you create a slider. Power BI generates a table and a measure with the selected value, which you can use in other measures:

Sales with Price Increase =
[Total Sales] * ( 1 + [Price Increase Value] )

The user moves the slider to 5% and sees the effect on sales (assuming volume doesn't change; you can add a second parameter for volume loss to make the scenario more realistic).

With two parameters the measure looks like this (check the Data pane for the exact name Power BI gave each parameter's measure):

Scenario Sales =
[Total Sales]
    * ( 1 + [Price Increase Value] )
    * ( 1 - [Volume Loss Value] )

Applied to Summit's 2026 sales ($268,259.16), the result is eye-opening:

If the price increase costs 5% of volume, Summit sells less than today. A slider lets the sales VP find that break-even point herself during the meeting, instead of arguing over a spreadsheet.

Dynamic titles and measure-driven formatting

A title that changes with the user's selection prevents confusion:

Sales Title =
"Sales for " & SELECTEDVALUE ( Customers[City], "all cities" )
    & " in " & SELECTEDVALUE ( 'Calendar'[Year], "all years" )

SELECTEDVALUE returns the value when exactly one is selected and, otherwise, the fallback text. In the chart's title, click the fx button and choose the measure.

The same fx button appears for colors: you can color bars with a measure that returns a color code, for example:

Attainment Color =
IF ( [Total Sales] >= [Target], "#16A34A", "#DC2626" )

Case study: Summit's sales rep detail page

The VP sees on the summary page that 2026 attainment is 97.4% and wants to know who's behind it. Right-clicking a rep › Drill through opens a filtered page with that rep's attainment by month, customers and products. The bars are colored with the Attainment Color measure (green if the rep hit the target, orange if not):

Only Marcus Johnson (South) beat his target: $64,030.83 against $63,675. Emily Carter sells the most ($74,641.76) and yet she's the furthest from her target, short by $3,133.24, because hers is the highest ($77,775). Without the detail page, the VP would have congratulated the top seller and missed the problem. The page's dynamic title ("Detail for Emily Carter · 2026") confirms at every moment what's on screen.

Common mistakes in interactive reports

Dynamic Title =
VAR SelectedMetric = SELECTEDVALUE ( Metric[Metric], "Total Sales" )
VAR SelectedCity   = SELECTEDVALUE ( Customers[City], "all cities" )
RETURN SelectedMetric & " by product · " & SelectedCity

Summary

• Hierarchies let users explore from the big picture to the detail with the chart's arrows.
• Drillthrough opens a page filtered to the chosen item; report page tooltips show detail on hover.
• Bookmarks, buttons and the Selection pane create alternate views on one page.
• Field parameters let users pick the metric or dimension; numeric parameters simulate scenarios.
• SELECTEDVALUE and the fx button create dynamic titles and colors.
• The detail page reveals what the total hides: at Summit, the top seller (Emily Carter) is the furthest from her target.

Next lesson: Publishing and Sharing in the Power BI Service with Row-Level Security. You'll publish your report: workspaces, scheduled refresh, apps and row-level security.