Taking Buttons in Power BI Desktop to the Next Level

Amanda Cofsky joins us to show how you can use buttons, in Power BI Desktop, to take your reports to the next level. Blank buttons can really make your Power BI Reports shine.
Connect with Amanda on Twitter: / missamandan
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[@ThisIsFrederic]

I loved this "100-page" moment so much, thanks for this good laugh!

[@user-bh2lg4xw5n]

6:06 ))

[@nmbambo]

For me I think it might be viable only if the pages are group able into logical categories. That way, you can create the button and then add an action to it that opens a panel with subgroup items of various "pages" or "visual pagings" of your choosing. Choosing the item on the panel automatically collapses the panel and shows the page chosen. JustSayin'.

[@sqldevdba9719]

Thanks so much for this video! We watch Amanda's videos every month and always wonder how the buttons look so awesome. The blank buttons on top of card just blew my mind! Thank you!

[@sanchit-sood]

Good to see you Amanda... Last time I saw you, was in the Introduction video to Power BI. I follow your Power BI updates video. The way you present is amazing , really easy to understand . Thanks Adam for bringing her. :) Keep up the good work Guy's. Lot of us here follow you.

[@Sanj803]

Good to see Amanda here with Adam, religiously listening to updates every month and eagerly waiting every month. You are doing great job. Please give user some control over data label positioning.

[@anirudhacs8814]

This channel is awesome! I've watched about 20 of your videos and I love the passion with which you talk. It is not a regular boring tutorial video that is hard to follow. When I'm watching your videos, I'm focussed 100%. Thank you so much! It's helping me a lot in my work

[@terrapinryepaleale]

Another AWESOME video tutorial! Glad I'm watching these before we get too deep into our initial Power BI rollout so we can incorporate all the (reasonable) functionality now.

[@paulrodriguezrevilla329]

Amanda ... very useful ... i go almost 2 weeks viewing all the material ... thank you for posting ...

[@diogopinto6039]

Very useful and beautiful design! As for the question, sometimes when I need more realstate I like to create slicers that actually select what measure is being shown in the analysis.

[@shivendrakumaryadav5811]

Thank you so much for sharing this. It helped. Additionally, I have used "Sync Slicers" to carry forward the filtration.

[@quinitawhitfield9541]

I love that the action of page navigation as an action on a button has replaced the need for a bookmark for each page.

[@Jolaracu]

I am doing exactly the same as Amanda did with page navigation using buttons, moreover, my client asked me to create an interactive menu that changes from one visual to the other (same product but different measures) so, I am about to get into that visual layering using the selection panel. I had that idea and after this video, I am sure I was pointing in the right direction. Thank you very much Guys.

[@maxartman8277]

Great video. I'm just starting PowerBI and it is exciting to see all of the things it can do.

[@mohanrajs871]

Thank you for the video. Really useful with the page navigation as I am embedding the report in the application where vertical scroll makes no visibility to the tab pages below.

[@nsgoldchannel]

This is really REALLY helpful and will change my approach. I'd gone down this route but had reservations as I didn't appreciate the significance of turning off Data, Display etc and couldn't figure out why clicking my buttons erased prior filter choices. Switching off Data in my bookmarks was the eureka moment you gave me to fix this. Thanks so much!!

[@GuyInACube]

YES! 👊 These can be very powerful. Glad it helped you on your journey.

[@varshaks7401]

I have done so many cool stuff in my reports after subscribing to your channel. Thanx much

[@CCHSmathematics]

I use buttons often but have not layered a button on a card. I love the idea and already know of a few ways this will help save real estate.

[@itpatel7268]

Excellent video, thanks a bunch to both of you for sharing these OOTB skills.

[@David-ey2jf]

I use buttons and bookmarks all the time but the invisible buttons over other content idea was new to me. I started using it today in a new report I'm building. Thanks for the tip!

[@leyshonrr]

Fab video, good to have an explanation for the data, display and current page checkbox options. I'd love to be able to group my selection pane items together in the same fashion as bookmarks, then be able to show or hide whole groups of objects, such as my collapsible slicer selection panes. Really like the blank button overlay on cards too.

[@PowerBITips]

If you love this Report layout, Come on over to PowerBI.Tips and download the Report here: powerbi.tips/product/layouts-microsoft-sept-2018/

[@EricaDyson]

Excellent. Thanks so much. Keep them coming! We need your insights and know-how!

[@rickystudds]

Sending some love to Amanda! I recognized your voice right away from the Power Bi Update Blog !

[@MattyHD403]

I love how passionate you all are about this. It makes me happy :)

[@GuyInACube]

Thanks for the kind words and thanks for watching! 👊

[@janibashashaik9412]

@@GuyInACube Hello, it's greate video.can i get that pbix file to see and get more exposure on this plzzzzzzzzz...its really [e-mail]...

[@jurakovtun6763]

You guys are just amazing! Still watching this in 2022 ;)

[@israelgonzalez677]

Awesome! I am just beginning with Power BI and your videos are quite useful :)

[@mwaltercpa]

Loved seeing this on the Covid dashboard on the live call this morning. This was helpful :)

[@GuyInACube]

awesome! Yeah you can do some crazy stuff with buttons and bookmarks.

[@andydougy4347]

Cheers sons crying...from happiness. This was great planning on diving into a new report using the buttons over cards.

[@daveflood5176]

Thanks so much! Such a great channel...every video I watch, I learn something valuable!!!

[@GuyInACube]

Great to hear! Thanks for watching Dave 👊

[@sforti01]

Excellent video. I laughed at the calculating dramatic pause at 6:07!

[@godude6950]

Similar to the new cross report drill through feature. I would love for these buttons to be able to navigate to pages in other reports all while staying within the same . I understand the link to a web URL is possible but being able to keep it in the same would be key

[@TheVamos777]

Like the invisible button trick. Also the selection rename is great, wish it was around when I build a 19 page report with load of visuals

[@eszterballa-petrasitz8864]

Option to group bookmarks is great, clears things up. What I think could be improved to have this same hierarchy automatically under actions-->bookmark dropdown selection, where you have to assign the action to the button. Otherwise it can be quite chaotic there after a while

[@michellejamison6263]

That navigation is awesome! This video has great info and tips. Thx.

[@pgcsec]

Great to see this in action - and now means I can add it to my work - thank you

[@GuyInACube]

You are welcome!

[@hjk01031967]

I plan on playing around with this, crazy good stuff

[@hasnainhaider8191]

Oh my, this was helpful. My first step in beautifying my dashboards :)

[@rjcassiafn]

You're making me actually like Power BI. The UX Team designed a tabs view and I was a bit lost on how to implement it using Power BI but you shed some light on the matter. Thanks.

[@GuyInACube]

Love it! I'm gonna get Chris Hamill on one of our live streams to talk more about report design.

[@manojsahu-oq7ht]

Thanks for greate info.. but here I have one question Do we need to add the navigation buttons in each page?

[@tommartens3953]

Once again an awesome video, and of course a great guest. Since the April release, I use the title property as it is possible to create dynamic titles - thanks for this feature. Maybe you might consider creating a "toggle" effect, meaning hitting the button the 2nd time goes back to the previous state.

[@2404Pepe]

Great girl !!!! she is simple and knows her stuff. Thanks so much

[@sjames1958]

Great video. One thing to feed back is embed codes can be hard to manage, it would be great if we could have a 'friendly' url instead of having to point at a report via an embed code. That way if a report needs to change our external users don't need to worry if the embed code changes. Thanks

[@ashwinshankar]

Thanks Guys, this is awesome. My question is If I have 2 separate sets of buttons using bookmarks to toggle between table and chart. How do I make the bookmarks not impact the other bookmark selection

[@WalterCalcagno]

how can I put a button into a table visualization, when the action "go to next page" for example,? just like an internal link.

[@celuikivient]

This is awesome ! I am defintely going to use it !

[@kapilkumarasamy5059]

thank you so much... was looking for something that you explained at 4:55 . It helped a lot..

[@nandyy27]

hi, Thanks a lot for all the tutorials. Its great, please keep doing such videos. Can anyone tell me if they have created a button which can be used to export visual data (table) to csv or xl?

[@kealkil4]

Liked the video. Not being able to set a Default Slicer value, is the issue that causes me most grief with Bookmarked Reports.

[@dsmviolin]

Thanks! What about using slicers instead of buttons to achieve the same thing that you showed with the cards? Is there a way to use a dropdown slicer to change the visuals on the page?

[@Rewena789]

Great video and I have a question. When you are showing the blank button on top of a card, is that a multi-row card with different colors I'm looking at (Usage)? I didn't think that was possible. I must be missing something. Thanks :)

[@will1315]

Thank you so much for showing this! Very good method to improve UX

[@samjosoff]

Is there a how-to on how to create the rest of this beautifully professional report? It was great to understand how the buttons work. I would like to see how the "next level" Report layout is designed

[@paulskuse3209]

Would love to see a selected state for a button too. We're often building two sets of buttons so that if something is conditionally selected, the button changes colour (i.e. switches to another button!). It would be great if we could just use one button for this!

[@phanisai9241]

Hello, Can you teach us ...when we hover on the button (P2) it should zoom out reveling the P3 like the animation on the Ring chart by MAQ software...it will make the report more visualizing

[@avpr1c]

Love the blank button idea. I’m going to layer it into a customer issue tracker. Question for y’all, do certain data sources load faster than others? I’ve been using Excel but is Access or SQL quicker? I’m looking to improve load speeds. My datasets aren’t even that big, sub 1000 rows

[@guusvanzuylen6501]

Awesome examples! Can you please share that 2nd .pbix too? I love your solution of blank buttons layered over cards.

[@akshaybholee3263]

now we have the new perfect feature for button, Page navigation. No need to use bookmark to navigate to pages. The buttons can be used for cool slicers now or drill down effects. i wanted to point out also if it's possible to remove the page navigation arrow below the report after publishing it so as to make the report more like an app feel.

[@smallflyDE]

Inspiring video! Thank you! I will try that :-)

[@koendoggenaar9539]

Hey, great video. How does the bookmarks show different visuals (around 8:21)? Are these just similar tables layered over each other and the bookmarks decide which layer is shown?

[@kingabullert7037]

This is very helpful, thank you. There is one functionality that I wish was easier in Power BI. That is enabling and disabling buttons based on the selection in visuals. For example, can I have a button that is grayed out unless I make a selection in my graph? I know there is a drill through button option with the March update, but there is no way to style the button while it's disabled - that is a major drawback of that feature.

[@stephanethia]

Great. In bookmark usage like you, when i have a lot bookmarks, it is unlike to have all of them in the action pane. When Microsoft will add the group level on the action button ?

[@johnreese1265]

Thanks for this info but how do you keep that columns of buttons visible all the time? With my design, when I click on Page 2 for example; I can see Page 2 but all my buttons disappear as they are only on Page 1. Thanks

[@pniiniko]

Hi and thank for both of you for a nice and informative presentation. Just one question; after making these new buttons with their connection to bookmarks, is it possible to adapt these funktionalities in the final dashboard as a view person? Greetings, Pasi from Finland

[@sudhakarkatamneni2061]

Great video Very useful. The information window is very helpful in web but not sure how to implement for the Mobile. It looks out of place like I am adding another visualization. How can I add/embed it into the existing visualization? My purpose is, when I tap/hover the visualization, I want to show information related to that visualization in the MOBILE. I appreciate your help.

[@Soulenergy31]

4:50 this part is key!!! thank you Guys in a Cube!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Love it!!

[@aprilwu3118]

Thanks for sharing! This is very helpful. How did she get the button to show grey when it's on that page and keep rest of the buttons white? For example, when she's on P1, the button has a grey background. When she is on P2, P1 and rest of the other buttons have white background, but P2 button has grey background. I tried to achieve this with the right-hand panel (visualization). But it hasn't worked for me.

[@thesatwikshenoy]

Thanks a lot for this. I always used a transparent rectangle shape. Not sure if a blank button and that is the same. But this sure changes the way I use buttons now!

[@GuyInACube]

Similar concept. 👊

[@AmandaCofsky]

The nice advantage of the buttons over rectangle shapes is that you can add the fancy hover effects. But if you don't need that, shapes definitely work as well!

[@thesatwikshenoy]

@@AmandaCofsky thanks a lot! Can't wait to try this out for my upcoming projects! Looking forward to more content just like this one. Cheers!

[@joaquinrocha5433]

its great to show the real power of the buttons, one question. How do you generate a bookmark to hide the diferent visualizations?

[@rkandathil]

It'd be great to have a button manager, so you can group them just like you can group bookmarks!

[@gauravmore5987]

Really like the concept! I have been using plane images for bookmarks purpose but this sure seems promising.

[@GuyInACube]

Woot! Glad this was useful. 👊

[@ruey-linlee5774]

Thank you. Want to create an additional checkbox on each row of a report. Each row shows an owner's billing amount. So they can review and click to approve their bill. More so, trigger a notification back to me when the checkbox is clicked. Is it possible?

[@femisape]

If you have 2 buttons, how do you change the color of the other button when you select the other button and vice versa in the same page?

[@ajitkancherla9594]

Appreciated for all your knowledge Hub!! will that be possible for video on Hide/show radio button using DAX measure and filed Value

[@jesuslondonoorozco7447]

Very useful guys. Your videos have helped me a lot. Keep doing it like that. Thank you :)

[@GuyInACube]

Love it! Thanks for watching. 👊

[@musafirq]

Awesome use of buttons...Thanks Amanda

[@GuyInACube]

Thanks for watching! 👊

[@josedacruz4058]

Very very useful... I was wondering how I was gonna do some interaction effects, now I wonder no more ;) Thanks!

[@malla1990]

Great stuff! Is there a way to navigate to different pages without pressing the control button first?

[@faroma80]

Great tip!! Is there any way to click the button without need to keep CTRL pressed?

[@syedrazahaider5038]

Great sir! Format button ( paint roller)is not showing in visualisations box. Plz help

[@miguelgago604]

How can we have dynamic buttons? Like Chiclet buttons, but providing also Actions (navigation, bookmarks, etc)?

[@larl07]

AMANDA! So cool to put a face to the voice! Love your videos every month! :D

[@k-lone]

So, I have a slicer panel set to multi select for items A,B,C, and D. I have no problem holding ctrl to select a combination of them. However, I'd like to assign a button outside of the slicer panel, so that I can hold ctrl+click that button, and it will add to the selection (the same as ctrl+clicking that item in the slicer panel). Is this possible? I've only been able to assign bookmarks to buttons it seems.

[@angelaebirim2705]

Very nice. Let's have more!

[@shashanksingh7462]

its cool to have the left page navigation thing but is there any way we can make the bottom page tab disappear as they are of no use after making navigation panel.Thanks

[@davidpanza4385]

This is great! I have created my navigation menu using pictures, directing bookmarks to each one, instead of using buttons...

[@GuyInACube]

Awesome! Very exciting. Glad you were able to get that sorted. Thanks for watching 👊

[@SandeepSeema1915]

How do I build a PowerBi Report from an existing SSRS report which is getting data from procedure with 6 to 7 parameters and also using Cascade parameter.

[@coldestrm6684]

How do I go about build a controlling parameter to choose the most current month number in a report, I then need a slicer to pick the month?

[@vog5197]

I started removing titles of objects in the View pane, because when a report is loading in the service, it shows the titles for a split second even when you have turned the titles off. I find it lifting the veil when the viewer is seeing a white page load with just a bunch of titles and loading circles at the start.

[@SIYABONGAZUNGU]

Best video, Keep up the great work!!!

[@niteshprabhu6791]

For the page navigation visual, do you have to recreate the visual on each and every page or is there a way to create only once and it will appear on others?

[@uniQue_XL]

Thank you so much for the great tips!

[@officesuperhero9611]

Great video. I recently learned about UNCHECKING the data option for bookmarks. I think those items should be UNCHECKED by default. Also, I have created buttons by creating images, grouping them together and then placing invisible/clear buttons over them. Would love to share with you what i did with buttons. I have gotten some really good feedback from people.

[@sushmita4713]

Please share it with me. I would like to see what you did

[@ayushmannanda5394]

Even I need to know

[@AshikKhan]

Hi there, liked your video, I have a question on auto scroll of pages, is this possible? Please advise

[@ziyad4u]

Great video! This is really helpful for pbi devs to improve the user experience.

[@tubevaishak]

I want to modify the filter based on button like, i want to increase or decrease day by 1 week on click of a button. I am not sure if this is possible in PowerBI.

[@baluaadyaanju]

So we can create a dashboard kind of thing in power bi desktop as in power service,but it is actually a report.... Very nice...i learnt good stuff to day...thanks

[@GuyInACube]

From my experience, a lot of folks use a report as a dashboard. Definitely possible. 👊

[@RenatoHaddadMVP]

Great video about Buttons, thanks. I would like suggest your team thinking about create a navigation panel, like a frame in web apps. you can add / remove or change any buttons in this frame. And also set the navigation panel on top or left.

[@manrique547]

Agreed, that would be great!

[@sagarchaurasia3342]

Can we have a capability of having custom tooltip page on button hover... I need that requirement & even we can build that using d3.js ?

[@venkateswarareddymarella4955]

Adam, can you please throw some light here ! what should be the position of Background Shapes in selection pane to hide them while clicking on the background shapes in web service

[@DerikTran]

do you use a button to filter the data to show all values less than 0? basically i like to group my data to 3 buckets. they are actually % so everything "< -15%", "-1515%". basically anything less than -15%, between -15 and 15, and greater than 15%. how would you recommend us doing that? can we use a button to do this? a slicer doesn't seem to cut.

[@johnfromireland7551]

There is now a Page Navigation option rendering the intermediate bookmark steps as not required.