September Updates- Drillthrough Pages in Power BI

How to Drillthrough Pages in Microsoft PowerBI

Well, it’s that time of the month again, as it were, it’s my favorite time of the month. The Power BI monthly feature release!!! [Cheer noise here]. Every month is packed with cool new features and connectors, but I think this month includes one of my favorites, They are called: Drilldown pages! Since I began working with Microsoft Power BI, one of my main frustrations has been the inability to provide navigation within a report. With the September release of PowerBI, Microsoft has given me a new superpower!

New Feature in September 2017 PowerBI Release

The new feature allows you to take the drill down functionality to the next level. Although this functionality was probably not released for the primary purpose of basic report navigation, we can now use it to accomplish just that. It will likely be a temporary fix because the true “storyboarding” functionality is already on the roadmap. This roadmap feature is being called “Bookmarking”, so feel free to Google it to find out more. In the meantime, I am glad to have something to allow for some sort of navigation, even if it is a little crude.

Adding Basic Navigation to the Office 365 Adoption Preview Pack

Eager to start exploring my new superpower, I used this method to add some basic navigation to the Office 365 Adoption Preview Pack.

Below are the steps I took to add this functionality.

  1. First, make sure you download the latest version of Power BI desktop. At the time of this blog it is the September 2017 release. You can find the download for the installer here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=45331
  2. Open your Power BI file. If you haven’t already, and would like to download the Power BI desktop template for O365 Adoption you can download it from here. https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/desktop/. If you need assistance you can reference this link: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Customize-the-Office-365-Adoption-content-pack-9b76065f-29b9-4b89-8059-c5f9db9ddbf6.
  3. Navigate to the Office activation page.

4. On the far right in the Fields pane, expand the TenantProductUsage table.
5. In the visualizations pane, locate the “Drillthrough filters” section.

6. Drag the “Product” column from the TenantProductUsage table into the Drillthrough filter.
7. Repeat step 6 for each of the product usage pages.

a.Exchange usage
b.Skype for Business usage
c.Yammer usage
d.OneDrive usage
e.SharePoint usage

8. Navigate back to the About the Adoption Content Pack page.
9. Create a new Table visual by clicking on the Table visualization icon from the Visualization pane.
10. Drag the “Product” column from the TenantProductUsage table into the Drillthrough filter.
11. Right click on each Product and hover over Drillthrough this will list all the pages that you have set up for Drillthrough functionality on the Product field.

This method will still require the user to have some knowledge on how Power BI visuals function, but it does provide a temporary workaround for the lack of inter-report navigation. I can’t wait to get this out to more of our clients and see how they react!

Have you had time to play with the new functionality? If so, and you have some thoughts, I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks!

Written by: Amy Schneider, PowerBI Consultant