PowerBI.tips

Tag: Bookmarks

Power BI Bookmarks Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices
This article describes Power BI Bookmarks tips, tricks, and best practices. Bookmarks are a powerful feature that can greatly improve the reader’s experience. However, there are several settings you should be aware of. Used incorrectly, they can become hard to maintain and often not display the intended functionality.

Power BI Bookmarks

This article will assume some basic knowledge on how to record or apply bookmarks. Please see this. If you are new to Bookmarks, you may want to watch this helpful video by Adam Saxton from Guy In A Cube.

It will run through an example of using a switch visuals bookmark group. If you have not seen this before, I suggest you watch this video, also by Guy In A Cube.

You should be familiar with:
The rest of the article will focus on some tricks and tips using bookmarks, while walking through an example of a visual switch between a map and a graph.

Tips Covered
Change Power BI Bookmark Settings

You should always update the bookmark settings when creating them. This should always be as specific as possible to the action they are trying to achieve.

Here is a quick breakdown of the settings:

Data: This captures items including filters and sort order. It does not capture if the item is visible or not.

Display: This captures whether an item is visible or not, without modifying filters or sort order.

Current Page: This will switch to the current page view if you apply the bookmark from a different page. If unselected, it will still apply the bookmark, but it will stay on the page you apply it from.

All Visuals: If this option is selected, it captures every setting on the page. This can include items in the filter pane, or even if the filter pane is open. I would recommend to never use this setting.

Selected Visuals: Selected visuals still only apply bookmarks to the visuals you had selected when you record the bookmark. You can select items by holding control and clicking on them in the selection pane.

In general, I try not to use both Data and Display together, as most cases bookmarks are just changing one of these fields. Previously, it was required to use bookmarks to navigate pages. However, this is no longer needed after new functionality allows this to be done with buttons directly. Therefore, I rarely use this feature.

One of the best Power BI Bookmarks tips – use selected visuals only. Recording bookmarks on all visuals often has unintended consequences and can be difficult to manage. Rarely is this needed and can become very hard when adding more visuals to the page.

Rename Your Visuals

The first tip is to rename your visuals. Each visual is given a name, which can be viewed in the Selection Pane. By default, the name is usually the type of visual it is. This means if you have several slicers on a page, you might get a list of several visuals with the same name. While this is not an end user feature, it can make it difficult to identify the correct visual when developing.

We recommend renaming each visual when you add it. First, open the selection pane. Next, double click on the visual you have just added in the selection pane. Rename the visual to something that calls out what it is. Our recommended naming strategy is the following.
```
Visual - Description
```
Example of renamed visuals in a selection pane

Pro Tip: When a page contains multiple bookmarks it’s difficult to know what Bookmark touches which Visuals or Groups. Thus, when you are planning multiple bookmarks on a single page add an ID at the end of the Visual or Group. This will correspond to a number listed at the end of the Bookmark.

Record Power BI Bookmarks on Groups

Using groups has huge benefits for Power BI bookmarks. If you record bookmarks on groups instead of individual visuals. Now, any edits made on the content of the groups will flow through, without the need to re-record bookmarks.

For example, let’s say I want a bookmark that switches a visual from a table to a map.

First, I’m going to make the groups. Open the selection pane. Whilst holding control, click on each visual that should be in the group. Right-Click on one of the selected visuals, then click the list option named Group then in the sub menu Group. You should also rename the group, so you know what it contains.

Note that to set up a group, you need at least two visuals. In my example, I have a graph visual and a title. If you have just one, you can still set up a group. Simply add a blank text box or shape and group it with your visual. You can then delete the blank text box or shape and the group will persist.

HINT: Elements can be difficult to move or select after grouping. If you want to modify a visual, use the selection pane to select it easily. If you want to move it, click and drag the ellipsis to move it.

Add Placeholder Groups to Easily add More Visuals

Next, I will set up the remaining groups. Aside from the map group, I’m also going to add some placeholder groups. To do this, I will add a blank visual and a blank text box.

Next, I’m going to select the new group. Then I’m going to copy and paste using Control-C and Control-V to create three placeholders.

Now that all the groups are set up, it is time to record the bookmarks! For each group follow these steps:
1. Using control, select all visual groups including the placeholders.
2. Using the eye, hide all visual groups except the Map – Visual Switch.
3. Rename the bookmark in the bookmark pane by double clicking it.
4. Click the ellipsis to open the bookmark settings.
5. Deselect Data and Current Page. Change to Selected Visuals. The settings should look like the picture above.
Rename and Group Bookmarks

Two more Power BI Bookmarks Tips are to rename the bookmarks and to group them. In addition to renaming your visuals when adding them, you should also rename your bookmarks. For the bookmarks themselves, I do action name – function.
Secondly, you should group similar bookmarks together. For example, the bookmarks in the visual switch should be put in the same group. This group can also be renamed. I often like to include the page name in the group and then its function.

Example of Power BI bookmark groups and names

Pro Tip: You will want to provide a connection between the bookmarks and the visual elements on the page. By adding an ID at the end of the Visual or Group and the Bookmark you can create a traceable link. This is especially important when you have multiple repot developers working on the same report. Adding an ID signals to the next report developer that these bookmarks are influencing the associated items on the Selection pane.

Layers

For this section, you should be familiar with the selection pane. Remember that objects at the top of the selection pane are in front of those below it.

Now that we have our groups, it makes it simpler to have buttons. In my example, I will create a button that says Graph, plus a button that says Map. If we are switching visuals, it is useful to have highlighted what visual is presented. I will highlight with a blue background and bold text.

One way of doing this, is to layer text boxes behind the buttons. First, create the buttons at the that will contain the bookmark action. This button will be see-through and slightly larger than the text boxes.

Next, create the middle text boxes that formatted for the selected button name.

Finally, create the back text boxes that are formatted for the unselected button name.

Example of the button elements

Keep it Tidy

Once we have repeated for all buttons, we can tidy it up. First, place all button elements in the same position on the page. You can do this easily using the align function.

Then, place the middle text box inside the group it relates to. This means when the bookmark is applied, the selected format will be visible for the correct visual. The trick is that we will layer the elements, so this text box will appear in front of the unselected text box. The buttons will always be on top, so the functionality will always remain the same.

Group the front buttons together, and make sure they are in front of the text boxes. These control the functionality of the Power BI Bookmarks.

Group the back text boxes together, and make sure they are at the back.

The layer sets:
Visual Switch Buttons: These are the buttons that apply the bookmarks. This is the top layer and always visible. This contains the Front Buttons.

Visual Switch Groups: This is the groups we set up earlier. This contains the text box that shows the highlighted button name. As the text boxes are part of the groups, only the selected one is visible. The is the middle layer. This contains the middle text boxes.

Button Text Boxes: This contains the text boxes that go at the back and show the unselected value. This contains the Back Text Boxes.

Final Words

Out of all the Power BI Bookmarks tips, the one I would stress the most is: use the selected visuals setting. It will make your reports much easier to maintain!

If you are not convinced to use bookmark groups, it was recently announced at MBAS 2021 some extra functionality. This will allow users to apply whole bookmark groups to a page, automatically adding buttons when you add extra bookmarks.

I also described a similar tip using buttons almost two years ago. This uses slightly more advanced technique, and some functionality was not out then that is now. However, it is still valid and a viable option.

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PBIX Hat
June 22, 2021
More Visuals Mo Problems
In some recent conversations the notion of minimizing the number of required visuals came up as a topic. While I know from talking with the Microsoft development team more visuals on a report page increases load time. But I haven’t been able to find any substantial numbers on how performance is impacted by increasing the visual count on a page. Spoiler alert, adding a ton of visuals to a page slows it down.

Test Set up

To begin our test I started with a know report the Microsoft September 2018 Layout. This was a good sample as it already had a number of visuals and buttons on the page. I then proceeded to create a single text box with some text in it. Then copy the text box over one hundred times. All the text boxes are placed into a single group. Grouping the text boxes allows for the ability to toggle on and off all of the visuals with a single click.

Here is the before image of the report with the text boxes turned off:

Now with all 100 text boxes turned on. Yes, not pretty I know, but it makes the point.

Conducting the Test

Now that the set up was complete we are able to use the performance analyzer to render all the visuals on the page.

To open the performance analyzer with the new modern Power BI ribbon. Navigate to the View ribbon and click on the Performance analyzer button.

With the Performance analyzer window open we Click the Start Recording button. This begins how the visuals perform when you interact with the report.

There are two options at this point to start recording data.
1. We can click on items on the report page
2. Click the Refresh visuals button to refresh the entire page
I chose option number two since I wanted a consistent method to record performance. This removes any human error by performing a sequence of clicks across the screen.

After clicking the Refresh visuals the Performance analyzer generates a ton of data that we can sift through to understand performance of the report page. You can expand on one of the visual elements to understand how many milliseconds it takes for the visual to render by function.

Note: For more details on each performance component read up on the Microsoft documentation found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/desktop-performance-analyzer

We can now export the data from the recording by Clicking the Export button.

For my test I ran 5 performance tests with the text boxes turned off and 5 tests with the text boxes turned off. The process was the following:
1. Click Start Recording
2. Click Refresh visuals
3. Click Export to extract the data, name the file for future review
4. Click Clear to remove all data
5. Go back to step 2 to Refresh visuals
6. Repeat process until 5 performance tests are complete
7. Turn on the Text boxes and repeat the process for 5 performance tests
The Test Results

Finally we can dig into the data and figure how much impact we incurred from all the visuals. After a bit of playing around with the datasets in Power Query we are able to come up with the following results.

At a high level adding the 100 extra text boxes increased the load time from 174 ms up to 3,100 ms which is a approximately a staggering 1700 % increase in load time.

Here is the detailed break down for average load times compared with and without text boxes.

There are some interesting notes here. When we added the text boxes it caused all other visuals to increase load time from 22 up to 28 % percent longer per object. Clearly the text boxes took the longest to render.

If you’d like to test this on your own, you can download these materials from this GitHub location: https://github.com/MikeCarlo/PBIReportVisualPerformanceTest

Implications & Observations

After completing this test there were a couple of observations that I felt would be best practices when building future reports.
1. It is important to take time to clearly label your visual elements on the report canvas. Doing so makes it easy to identify each item in the performance analyzer.
2. Increasing the number of visuals on a page hurts rendering performance. So think carefully about how many visuals you need to add to convey the data story you are trying to tell.
3. When a visual is not shown it does not impact performance rendering of the page.
4. A trend I am seeing is individuals are creating really long pages. Meaning the page is 1280 x 3000 or even 4000 pixels long. This is a nice feature that lets the report consumer scroll through multiple visuals. However, this has an unintended consequence adding all the extra visuals is slowing the time for the report to render. Instead of increasing the page length it would be better to control which visuals are being shown by using Bookmarks and Grouping. To learn more about bookmarks & grouping visuals visit:
5. Limit adding style elements such as drop shadows and visual shading images as these will increase load speeds. Instead push those types of changes down to a background image that can be placed on the page. This is the technique used in creating PowerBI.Tips layouts.
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Go Ahead Make My Data

PBIX Hat
December 6, 2019
Scale a Visual
For each visual in Power BI Desktop there is a button called Focus Mode. This feature highlights a single visual. While this can be helpful, it does remove the ability to change or adjust the visual based on filters or slicers. I’d like to introduce to you the concept of Scaling a visual.

In this tutorial we walk through how to take a collection of visuals. Then group all the visuals. Finally, control the group of visuals by hiding or showing them with bookmarks.

Check out this video tutorial on how to accomplish this within Power BI Desktop.

Tutorial Video

Downloads

Download the icons and sample PBIX file at my GitHub repo.

Download the layout used in this tutorial here.

Other Resources

Here are some other great tutorials around using the grouping feature in Power BI Desktop.
If you like the content from PowerBI.Tips please follow us on all the social outlets. Stay up to date on all the latest features and free tutorials. Subscribe to our YouTube Channel. Or follow us on the social channels, Twitter and LinkedIn where we will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content.

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Go Ahead Make My Data

PBIX Hat
November 20, 2019
Consolidate Report Pages Easily with Visual Grouping

We do a ton of Layouts here at powerbi.tips and with the introduction of the new visual grouping feature I was looking for different ways I could utilize that functionality to make templates for different reporting scenarios. First, if you aren’t familiar with how to build a visual group, be sure to check out a blog Mike wrote on this a little while ago on the subject.

While I was exploring an idea of how I might leverage this new feature, a challenge I’d seen re-occurring in the Power BI Community forums popped to the forefront of my mind. This new feature gives a perfect solution for answering the question of Report page consolidation.

Time and again I’ve seen people talk about navigation issues related to the number of pages or tabs they have in their reports. Sometimes, particularly in embedded scenario’s, you can’t reduce the pages and break them up into smaller reports. This could already be accomplished in the past, but man oh man, good luck finding what you were looking for in the selection pane. Let me show you how easy this is to accomplish with the addition of the new visual grouping feature. By walking through these few examples you can extend this to however many pages you need following the same patterns I describe below.

Setup:

On your main page, make some room for buttons that you can create to toggle your pages on/off. You can see I did that in the image below.

Next we’re going to click on the top object of the selection pane and hold SHIFT + Click the last object, this will highlight all the objects.

Right click and select Group from the drop down menu.

This will create a “Group 1”

Let’s rename this to Page 1. You can do that by Double Clicking on the group name and typing in the new name, Page 1.

Next, we’ll create a button called “Page 1”

Select the Home ribbon, then click the icon called Buttons.

Choose a Blank button from the drop down. In the formatting pane under the visualization area choose the section titled Button Text and toggle it on, then type in Page 1.

Place the button in on the right side of the screen.

Great, now since we just created this button, let’s create a second button. This one will be for our “Page 2”. Follow the same steps above or select the Page 1 button and do a CTRL + C (copy command) / CTRL +V (paste command) to create a new button. Rename it to Page 2 and you should end up with this

Prep Additional Page

Now, here is where this gets cool. Imagine you have N number of pages, all with roughly 10 objects on each page. We are going to go to each page and condense all the objects down to a single one. Go to your second page, in the same fashion that we created our page 1 group, we select all the objects in the selection pane.

An alternative method would be to just click on your report canvas and CTRL + A to select all objects, then right click and create group. We now see our new group in the selection pane and we can double click to rename it Page 2.

Bring It Together

Now Click on the Page 2 group and hold CTRL +C to copy the group

Navigate to page 1 and CTRL + V to paste the group.

This will bring all the objects from your Page 2, to page 1 and it will look like a giant mess similar to this

But you know what isn’t a mess? The Selection pane! Because we created the group, all we need to do is toggle the Page 2 visual icon to off

And our page looks normal again. Now let’s hook up the buttons and bookmarks.

Go to the View ribbon and open the Bookmarks pane.

Click the Add button at the top of the window. This will create a snapshot of the current state of the report page. Double Click the bookmark that is created and change the name to Page 1.

Now, toggle the Page 1 visual group off from the Selection Window. Then turn the visibility of Page 2 visual group to on.

Create a second bookmark. Now, change the name to Page 2. You’ll likely notice that things just aren’t aligned right (at least in my case that is true because I’m using a background.

But since the visual grouping is its own object, all I need to do is select it and all the visuals resize for me! I don’t have to individually mess around with each one! Super cool.

The last thing we need to do is connect our buttons with our bookmarks. We Select the Page 1 button. Choose the Action in the formatting and toggle it On.

Select the Bookmark from the Type drop down. Then Select the Page 1 bookmark we created.

Repeat the same thing for Page 2. You have just created navigation buttons to the two views of your report pages.

CTRL + Click in Power BI desktop will activate the actions on the buttons. Finally, you can see that you will toggle between the report pages on the single page. WHEW!

Closing

This was possible before visual grouping, but now it is an EXTREMELY clean and efficient way to consolidate your report pages and add a ton of objects into a single page. You do have a lot of objects on the page, but don’t worry there isn’t a performance impact because they don’t render until you click the button to make them appear. You can test this out by enabling the Performance Analyzer in the View ribbon.

Visual grouping coupled with bookmark grouping have made these features fun to use and easily manageable for all. This is just a simple use case where extending the use of visual grouping to help us manage our reports better can make a world of difference as we build. I hope you enjoyed this post and that it helps you clean up any reports you may have that got a little unwieldy.

If you like the content from PowerBI.Tips, please follow us on all the social outlets to stay up to date on all the latest features and free tutorials. Subscribe to our YouTube Channel, and follow us on Twitter where we will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content. Alternatively, you can catch us on LinkedIn (Seth) LinkedIn (Mike) where we will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content.

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November 12, 2019
Filled Donut Chart, Yumm..
We are starting today off with a fun chart. We will be making a filled donut chart. Typically, I don’t use donut charts but in this case I think we have a good reason, and it’s delicious…

The data being used in this visual varies from o to 100%. This could be something like a test score or a compliance number. Thus, we will be using the donut chart to represent a completion of 100% or some variant below.

Video on how to build this chart.

During this video we used a couple measures. They are the following:

Measures
```
Average Product Score = AVERAGE( 'Product Scores'[Score] ) / 100 
```
```
Average Product Score Inverse = 1 - [Average Product Score]
```
Where the value of the Score comes from the Product Scores table. The Score column ranges from 0 to 100%. If you like this visual and want to download a sample file visit my GitHub page.

If you like the content from PowerBI.Tips please follow us on all the social outlets. Stay up to date on all the latest features and free tutorials. Subscribe to our YouTube Channel. Or follow us on the social channels, Twitter and LinkedIn where we will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content.

Introducing our PowerBI.tips SWAG store. Check out all the fun PowerBI.tips clothing and products:

Check out the new Merch!

Hasta La Vista Data

Go Ahead Make My Data

PBIX Hat
October 8, 2019