Power BI Bookmark Navigator – A Better Hack

As a report author, you are constantly pressed to fit more visuals into a single page. The November release of Power BI Desktop introduced the Power BI Bookmark Navigator, which simplifies the process of creating a tabbed interface, such as this one.

Since Power BI doesn’t support visual containers or a “menu” visual, you must resort to the awful hack of hiding and showing UX elements by bookmarking them. This reminds me of the beginning of my career as a developer where we didn’t have widgets and we had to hack our way through implementing a custom navigation “experience” by toggling visibility. Alas, this continues in the 21^st century but at least the hack got simplified. To implement the tabbed interface:

1. Add two (or more) overlapping visuals.
2. Add two bookmarks (Bar Chart and Column Chart) that show and hide the appropriate visual. Don’t worry about hidden visuals impacting the report performance because Power BI doesn’t process them.
3. Add the two bookmarks to a Tabbed Interface bookmark group.
4. In Report View, go to the Insert ribbon, expand the Buttons menu, and then click Navigators, “Bookmark navigator”.

Currently, Power BI supports two navigators. The “Page navigator” adds a tabbed navigation menu with a tab for each report page to let the user navigate to a given page by clicking the corresponding tab. The navigator that will inspire more interest is the “Bookmark navigator”.

1. Notice that by default the navigator adds a tab for each bookmark defined in the report, but in this case, you just need to restrict it to the two bookmarks that you previously created. With the navigator selected, expand the Bookmarks section in the “Format navigator” pane, and select the “Tabbed Interface” bookmark group.
2. Position the navigator above the two visuals. Remember that in Power BI Desktop, you need to press Ctrl when you click that navigator tabs to switch between the visuals.

Limitations and bugs:

1. The previously selected tab gets stuck in a highlighted state, so you must hover on it to make it appear “unselected”.
2. Hierarchical navigation is not supported. For example, you might want to build a page navigation experience like in Power BI apps. However, you can’t define a hierarchy, such as to start the user at the bookmark group level and then drill down to bookmarks.
3. Although you can somewhat customize the tab appearance, no UX designer will probably be impressed. For example, one feature that could be useful to free up more page real estate is to be able to toggle the navigator visibility.