8. Lighthouse

Level 7 · Bookmarks and buttons

From Amanda Price, Director of Operations

“On the fulfilment page I'd like two buttons, 'Chart' and 'Table', that swap the monthly chart for a detailed table in the same spot. The thing that annoyed me last time: whoever built it, pressing a button also reset my slicers to whatever they were when the button was made.”

Your goal

Pick the bookmark setup that swaps the two visuals without touching the reader's slicer selections.

How should the two bookmarks be set up?

Pick one answer, then check it.

The lesson

A bookmark saves a state of the report: which page, which filters and slicer picks, which visuals are visible, how a visual is sorted or drilled. Apply it later and Power BI puts that state back. With buttons on top, bookmarks become toggles, menus and guided stories.

What you are working in

This quiz runs in a practice page, not Power BI. In Power BI Desktop open View → Bookmarks and View → Selection; both panes open on the right.

What a bookmark stores

Click Add in the Bookmarks pane and Power BI captures the current state. Then open the bookmark’s … menu: the ticked options decide what it restores.

  • Data: filters (visual, page, report), slicer selections, sort order, drill location.
  • Display: visibility from the Selection pane, spotlight and focus mode.
  • Current page: switches to the page it was saved on. Untick it and the bookmark applies to whatever page the reader is on.
  • All visuals or Selected visuals: restore the state of every visual, or only the ones selected when you saved it.

A bookmark you change needs Update in the same menu; otherwise it keeps the old state.

A chart/table toggle

  1. Put the chart and the table in the same spot.
  2. In the Selection pane, hide the table (the eye icon). In Bookmarks, Add, rename it Show chart, and in its menu untick Data.
  3. Hide the chart, show the table, Add Show table, untick Data.
  4. Insert → Buttons → Blank, give it the text Chart. In Format button → Action, turn Action on, Type: Bookmark, Bookmark: Show chart. Repeat for Table.

In Desktop, Ctrl+click a button to use it while editing; in the Service a normal click works. For several bookmarks, Insert → Buttons → Navigator → Bookmark navigator builds a row of buttons from a bookmark group in one step.

When bookmarks are worth it

  • Navigation and menus: buttons that jump to a page with a state (Current page ticked).
  • Show and hide: a filter panel that slides in, a chart/table swap, an info overlay.
  • Scenarios on one page: “2025 only”, “web only”, “returns view” as saved selections, with Data ticked on purpose.
  • Storytelling: a sequence of bookmarks walked through like slides, from the View button in the Bookmarks pane.

Common mistakes

  • Everything ticked by default. Decide for each bookmark whether it should touch the data.
  • Forgetting new visuals. A visual added after the bookmarks were made isn’t in them: applying one leaves it as it is, so a toggle stops hiding it until you update each bookmark.
  • Personal bookmarks are different. Readers in the Service can save their own bookmarks; those aren’t part of the report and can’t drive buttons.

Cookie settings

Pick what may run on this site. You can change this any time from "Cookie settings" at the bottom of every page.