pbPassingBI
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Visualisation & sharing intermediate 6 min

Bookmarks and navigation

Saved states, the selection pane, and building custom navigation.

What you'll be able to do
  • Create and apply bookmarks
  • Use the selection pane to show and hide visuals
  • Build a button-driven report

Bookmarks

A bookmark saves the current state of a page — filters, slicer values, sort order, drill level, and which visuals are visible.

View → Bookmarks → Add. What gets captured is configurable per bookmark via its ... menu:

  • Data — filters and slicers
  • Display — visibility and spotlight
  • Current page — whether it navigates
  • Selected visuals — apply to only some visuals rather than the whole page

That last option is what makes bookmarks precise rather than blunt.

The selection pane

View → Selection lists every object on the page, with visibility toggles and grouping.

Combined with bookmarks, this is how you build a chart switcher: place a bar chart and a line chart in the same position, hide one, save a bookmark for each state, and wire buttons to them. The user appears to toggle chart type; you are swapping visibility.

Group related objects in the pane so a bookmark can show or hide a whole panel at once.

Buttons and navigation

Insert → Buttons, then set the action type:

ActionDoes
BookmarkApplies a saved state
Page navigationGoes to a page
BackReturns to the previous page
Drill throughNavigates with context
Clear all slicersResets the page

The Navigator button type builds a page menu automatically and updates when you add a page — better than wiring each button by hand.

Common patterns

  1. 1Chart switcher — same position, visibility toggled by bookmark
  2. 2Slide-out filter panel — a hidden panel shown by a button
  3. 3Reset button — Clear all slicers, so users can start over
  4. 4Guided tour — a sequence of bookmarks stepped through in order

A caution

Bookmarks capture state at the moment you save them. Change a visual later and the bookmark may not reflect it, which is a common source of a report behaving oddly after edits.

Update the bookmark after changing anything it captures.

Key points
  • Bookmarks save filters, visibility and drill state
  • Selection pane plus bookmarks is how chart switchers are built
  • Bookmarks capture state at save time — update them after edits
Check yourself