Drills and Slicers: Meeting multiple user needs in PowerBI

User navigation can be varied across an audience, or the requirements of an individual user.

This article considers the needs of people who either want to drill down into a detailed view of a category, and/or have the ability to select multiple categorise from a slicer (filter list) in PowerBI.

Keeping it simple, this dashboard could be built with two separate pages to show the data. There are two drawbacks to this:

1. The user wants to begin with a drill down and then open up their options. They would need to re-route to the other page. This is unlikely to feel intuitive.
2. When developing, you will need to replicate each of the pages in exactly the same way every time, effectively creating and additional job. No one with thank you for this, yourself included.

Is it worth the extra time and effort to make this all work from one single view? Absolutely.

There are a few obvious starting points, however there is a problem. When you operate either the drill or the slicer, one cancels out the other. This is not recoverable by the user.

A summary of tools to fix the problem:

1. Bookmarks
2. Slicer syncs
3. Buttons
4. Button actions

In this example we’ll set up two different entry points to the target page. One will be routed through a drill-through page, the other as a direct entry for the user-select option. Whilst this can be set to ‘all’, defaulting to the first on the list has proved more presentable in the data I am using.

I’ll name the pages as follows.

Navigation page

Contains some navigation buttons including:

1. A button that takes the user to an overview of the data, from which the user can drill through.

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2. A button that takes the user directly to the target page, default to first item selection.

Example of a navigation front page

Overview page

This can be any chart or graph that the user will drill through. I can be one layer or more, in that you can explore the hierarchy of data before ‘drilling through’ to a more detailed view of the data.

Example of an overview of categories, by which a user can right click to drill down or drill through.

Target page

The ‘target page’ is the detailed view of the category/categories that the user might want to explore. The user might find themselves in this space using a drill through from the overview page, in which case they will find a slicer with the ability to make multiple selections.

Guide

Starting with the Target page, complete the following:

1. Set the drill down to category from your route 1 selection page.

2. Create a bookmark called ‘Introduction’ , and a corresponding button that takes the user back to the introduction page. This bookmark should be set to take the user to the introduction page with the (yet to create) intro slicer set to ‘all’.

3. Create a bookmark called ‘Target page’, that brings the user to the target page whereby the slicer for categories is set to ‘all’.

4. Add a button that has an action to ‘reset all slicers’ on the page (this will allow the drill-through user to release the selection.

5. Set the graphs and charts to the ‘first on the list’ as default.

6. Add a slicer to the navigation page that is set to ‘all’ and is then hidden.

7. Select the ‘sync slicer’ panel to ensure the introduction button is in synch with the target page. This will reset each time the user is directed back to the introduction page.

There may be moments of re-saving and re-synching in this process, but using the combination of bookmarks, syncs, buttons and actions you should be able to create a seamless journey for your users without the need to create multiple pages to your detailed view of data.

Remember to set all of your slicer options to suit your project.