Drill-Through: Filter and Specify

In this blog, we will talk about the drill-through feature of Power BI. Power BI, a tool incorporated by Microsoft in 2011 is a Business Intelligence tool for data visualization with a visually appealing approach. Business Intelligence focuses on data and its meaningful interpretation, and as an organization, whether of any genre or any interest, it becomes extremely indispensable to have a complete logical interpretation of your data. Analytics plays a major role in this process.

To have complete access to your data is fine but if you try to think it even more practically and logically, then to be able to make conclusions out of every type of data specifically makes your job even easier. Data without proper management and analysis is just like broken pieces of a cookie jar which are meaningless when distorted but useful as a jar.

Now, if I can navigate and sort the data according to my convenience, analysis becomes quite easy. Within a few clicks, you can directly jump to a specific page of your report that you want to view. The drill-through feature helps you save time and makes your work even easier. There are so many amazing benefits of this feature you must know. Let’s discover them together.

Benefits of drill-through feature :

• Drill-down and Drill-through help you understand the hierarchical relationship of data and let you explore different levels of hierarchy in the report.
• It sets up a destination page that focuses on specific parameters in the report according to your choice.
• This feature saves you time by having a convenient few-clicks approach.
• It provides clarity to the one who is viewing the report by providing them with a clear understanding of the distribution of data and their graphs.
• Drill through works so many different visualizations of Power BI such as charts, graphs, tables, etc.

Types of drill through in the Microsoft Power BI:

There are four common types of drill through in Power BI. Let’s find out!

Drill through using the Back button

In this, Power BI generates an automatic back button image to go back to the source report. Basically, when you add a particular field in the filter with drill-through, the back button image visual gets generated.

To set this up, first, you have to select the visual, and then in the build visual section, just drag the field that you want to drill through. Doing this will generate the back button itself and you’re done here.

Drill through using your own image button

The first method as we discussed is for generating an automatic back button visual. Considering that it is just a visual only, we can also customize this button by replacing the preset back button visual with a customized one.

It is quite easy to do. You just have to insert the image from home by using the insert tab and then select the desired image. On the drill-through page, select the ‘format image’ button. During the formatting, turn ‘ON‘ the Action slider and then specify the type as ‘Back‘. Now, you will see that this image behaves like a back button visual.

Drill through by adding a measure

We’ve already talked about adding filters and customizing the back button but there is another way to drill through the report. We can add a particular measure or a summarized numeric column in the drill-through section. Just drag and drop it. Whenever you put that field in the visual’s value, you can drill through the page. This way we can drill through by adding a measure in Power BI.

Cross Report Drill through

There is another method to drill through within reports which is called “cross report drill through”. This is the best method to sort reports on the basis of relativity where you can move from one report to another that shares some related information. In other words, we can say that this is a way to connect the reports.

To set this up, you have to turn on the Cross-report toggle in the drill-through section of the target file in the specified report.

Limitation: Power BI cross-report drill-throughs don’t work with Power BI reports made using the power BI report server.

Conclusion

Power BI drill-through is an amazing way to make your reporting much more efficient and user-friendly. Sorting different sorts of data accordingly makes it very easy to access information and helps in fast decision-making.

This blog gives you an overview of drill-through in Power BI. I hope you found this helpful and informative.

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Thanks for reading!