Power BI Drill Through is great functionality, but it isn't always the best option
That's why we're going to show you five different
Alternatives which may work better for you
but if you came to this video wanting to learn about Power BI Drill Through
then click in the corner to check our videos showing you how to use Power BI Drill Through now if you're ready to look at
Alternatives to Power BI Drill Through then let's get started.
My name is Avi Singh I'm a Microsoft MVP and best-selling Power BI author
And if you want to become a Power BI Pro, make sure to subscribe and click that bell
So you are notified whenever I go live to answer your Power BI questions. Before we take a look at the alternatives
Let's take a really quick
look at drill drill drill through is simple once enabled you can right click on an element and
Choose a drill through option which is gonna take you to more detailed page
so here I'm selecting Germany drill through a country detail and
that takes me to a different page with that selection already made and I can see all the
Detail about the general Germany in the trends transactions, and this could be whatever you build
So that's in essence the idea of a drill through and as you saw the purpose of a drill through is simple
It's simply to show the user more detail
however
That can be done in different ways other than drill through. That's where the
Alternative options come into play and let's start and number one and that's cross filter
So remember the goal here is to simply show the user more detail now in this case
When we were drilling down to a specific country
You saw how the report was structured and it had trends and it had a map and at this
Area chart now of course, and so this is gonna be your choice as the power bi
developer or as a bar beyond otter then you can decide the layout of the report and instead of
Them having to drill through and you know kind of find it and right-click and all of that sort of stuff you can instead build
The report so that those elements are on that page itself
So the elements that are needed are on the page itself and if they want to select a space we drilled through with that functionality
or if they want to see a specific detail that functionality is
always built into power bi by default
all they have to do is touch or click right so I can I can click on United Kingdom and this is
default behavior everything else cross filter
So now the the numbers up top the high level of the trends and the stable here this graph over here is set to United
Kingdom if I'm going to see Germany ought to use click Germany or Australia and everything else a chance
So again, if if you want them to see a specific detail
It is not necessary to use drill through you can simply use cross filter
Hey, I just want to say that the file that I'm using to demonstrate these five alternatives
You can download that and the treasure chest of all my files at learn power bi comm slash download
So far we had drilled through
Let's go to the alternative number two, which is tool tips and report page tool tips
Now tool tips are built into power bi so if you notice here that as I hover over an element
It shows me the information about that but not just that you have an option to
if I select this visual
Then you have this tooltip field where you can add additional data fields and I have already done that in
This other graph or if you again if you look at the tooltip section for this graph I have added these other
Information again from my field one, right? So it's not shown on the graph
Unless and until I hover over something so so watch what happens here as I hover over something and those
Additional Animus which does show the name the country and the sales these elements are being shown in the graph as well
But then you have an additional section and this can be as many as much information as you want
You can keep stacking numbers. Of course at some point is gonna get ridiculous, but you can add additional
information in the
Tooltips right there now not just that tooltips have a really incredible feature
Which lets you show like a graphical report page tooltip. Let's take a look at that
so
I'll just show to you first and then you know pointed to where it's built so you can notice and you probably notice it earlier
as I was interact thing with the report that as I'm hovering over these
elements notice that all I have to do is just kind of hover over a minimun and then this
This pop up display comes up and it's showing me more information
It's showing me the the trend it's showing me that and of course
This is a custom page so you can design it as you as you see fit. Now. This page is
Right here country tooltip now
The only a distinction here is that the tooltip page size is not gonna be big and and note so you're gonna have to select
in the page size
You're gonna have to select tool - page size and it's not that big so you can't fit in a whole report
But sometimes you don't need a whole report you just want some key information and that you can show just using either, you know
The built in tooltips these ones or using maybe a report page tool tip
number three if you have external reporting system, these could be your legacy systems, which have always been there or these could be
In the Microsoft family SSRS reports that you can link to then you can often use dynamic links to link to external report now
Hey, I don't have a system like that. So I'm just gonna you know, make Google my poor man's friend
but again imagine in this case that you had a system, which was your own server either your
sequel server reporting server where you can create dynamic links or point to the report using dynamic links or
Some other system where they could pass those parameters. So in this case, you know, I'm really using Google as monitoring engine
So here what I have is you can see that these links are dynamic. So right so
Notice here. The country is kind of here, Australia Canada, France and Germany and so forth and if I
Let's try that again
There we go
Yeah
you can see that so you can see how
These URLs are generated dynamically, and if you want to examine the measure and how I'm building it and so forth
Just go to the URL that I mentioned earlier and download this file and examine everything in more detail
Right so you can have a setup like this and and then if somebody says hey
You know click and they will see in this case. Well Google brings up a nice graph, which is not bad, right so
Right, so but imagine in this place is your own reporting system
SSRS or some other system that you are in use where you can pass in
These links to link to specific or detailed pages in the report
So that was dynamic link to external reports what you can do the same thing with power bi reports
now, of course that works a little differently, let's go back to this and
So, let's see how this report has been built
so first thing is
simple the the URL is there but then there's this specific format to pass in the
parameters and again
you can examine the file to see how this measure is built and how I'm doing that but again, the effect is identical so you
can have
These things in a table or in a different format and different visuals
Whichever supports the web URL and then if somebody wants to see a Germany, I would like to see the population trend for Germany
They can just click on that. And in this case, it's gonna open up the power bi report, right?
So in three-two-one Germany it is right so you can see and of course
This can be any report that you can link to now this might seem similar to if you've seen my original
Drill through videos. I talked about cross report drill true
This is similar to that
But the advantage of this is that at this point cross report drill through is only allowed for reports within the same workspace
But this has no such limitation
You can link to any power bi report in your system and kind of open that by passing in dynamic URL parameters
Hey before we go on to number 5. I just wanted to make a quick shout out to our power bi tutorial
So if you're just getting started or keep getting stuck in power bi make sure to click in the corner and check out our complete
step-by-step power bi tutorial
So number 5 if you show the option
Alternative power bi drill to really show the user more detail is using bookmarks and bookmarks or of course
It's it's gift that keeps on giving a very flexible feature
You can have a lot of users and and and you can use that to show more detail
So I want to show you a simple example in this case
So in this case, we're looking at a report page, you know this
In fact, I'm using it as a drill through page, but ignore that fact for now imagine
This is a report page and they you can have a toggle which is driven by using bookmarks
And the user can just click to see more detail in and in this case
I'm showing them a table, which of course does show them a lot more detail in sales every percentage
But again, you're not limited to that
I mean if you wanted to you could use this toggle to
completely change this whole report you could override all the elements in here and
Really show whatever you want so you could have a toggle saying hey show detail and on the same page without
Navigating without drill true, this is a kept detail and then you don't go back to the origin summary
So those where the five alternatives I covered
Which you can use instead of power bi drill through I would love to hear from you
Which one of these do you love? And which one of these maybe you hate?
So let us know in the comments below and of course if you know of any other options
Which can be used to show the user more detail
Let us know about that as well and make sure to check out our original videos on
Barbie our drill through and how to do that more until next time power on my friend
Hey keep watching more videos and keep learning power bi but if you did enjoy this video
I would love to hear from you. So leave a comment like subscribe
All the good stuff while we're on my friends