4.12 Create bookmarks - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v Instructor>In this sub-lesson,</v> we're going to talk about what I think is one of the most powerful features in Power BI, but sometimes the most often under utilized. We're going to learn how to create bookmarks, arrange bookmarks, and use the selection pane. So once again, we'll get our supporting desktop file open here and double-click on it and give it a moment to open up. Okay, so we have the desktop opened here. Before we dive into creating bookmarks, let's talk a little bit about a common way that stories are actually told in analytics these days and talk about how bookmarks can actually make that a much more rich experience. Okay, so let's just suppose that you're an analyst at AdventureWorks and you've got your report page all laid out like this and you're getting ready for a board meeting where maybe you want to compare 2020 sales. So let's just go ahead and choose our 2020 sales here. And we want something that looks like this. And then we want to also go in and do a separate visual that is for 2019. And maybe we want to go in and do a separate visual for 2018. And maybe for 2018 we actually want to go in and take a look at, you know, Canada is the only country we'll take a look at for that particular year. So the way this would be classically done is basically by getting the filters set the way I just did here. And then somebody would go into their favorite screen capturing tool and take a picture of this and drop it into a PowerPoint presentation. So here's what the final PowerPoint presentation would look like. You can see that I basically just went through and did a screen capture on the report with countries being all in year 2020. The second slide is all in year 2019. And the third slide we have here is Canada for 2018. So once again, this is a really common way for people to go ahead and do their storytelling. So typically we'd take this, we'd put it into a presentation mode, which we'll go ahead here and do, and we would end up winding the story, something like this. So we'd go into our executive meeting or whatever meeting we're having that's going to tell the story. And we'd go to page number one and talk about 2020 and maybe somebody would ask us a question about, you know, maybe some of the products that were selling in 2020 and you'd say, "Well, I'll get back to, information to you later on because I can't actually interact with this visual because it's just a picture." And then maybe the story moves to 2019 like so. And once again, we have a good discussion around it, but somebody says, "Well, boy, that's a, those sales are really below what our target was. Can you tell me what's going on?" And once again you have to say, "Well, let me go back to the desk and see if I can explain the stuff by interacting with my visuals on my own." And then finally you'd go to the last page which would be Canada for 2018 and you get the flow of the story here. This is a very common scenario where people take stuff out of their reporting tools, no matter what it is, it's Excel, other reporting tools, and they cut and paste those visuals into PowerPoint presentations and then tell the story that way by cycling around. I'm going to show you a better way to actually do it inside of Power BI. (computer mouse clicks) Okay, so I'm now back out on my Power BI desktop with no filters on my reports for my slicers, aside from the ones that are coming through the filters pane here. So let's go ahead and arrange this story using bookmarks. So the first thing that we're going to do here is we're going to go to our view tab and I'm going to activate the bookmarks pane and I'm actually going to activate the selection pane. So I'm going to bring both of these up at once. And what we'll do here is we're going to create a default homepage for this particular report that shows what things look like on the overview. So what I'm going to do here first is I am going to go to the bookmarks page and I'm going to click add. So I'm going to add my very first bookmark. And what we're going to do here is we're just going to go ahead into the bookmarks pane. I'm going to click these ellipses here and I'm going to say rename, and I want to rename this to performance dashboard home. Okay, so our rename is complete. I'm actually just going to close the visualizations pane here, just to give us a little bit more real estate as we're going through and doing our work. So I want to be able to see a little bit more on the bookmarks and selections pane. Actually, maybe we're going to do twos. I'm going to close my filters pane out just as well. So let's go ahead and do that just to rearrange the screen a little bit. Okay, so what I'm going to do here now is just for safety sake, I'm going to go here and click update. And now that is the very first page of our report. Okay, so what we're going to do next here is let's go ahead and filter this report down to 2020. So I'm going to go like this, go to 2020, get my view set up like so, and now what I'm going to do here is I'm going to add a brand new bookmark again. So I'm going to click on add. And I'm going to go through and name this one to 2020 sales. Okay, so I've got that one there. Now let's go ahead and we'll change this to 2019 and I'm going to once again click add, I'll go down here and say rename and I'm going to call this 2019 sales view, like so. Go ahead and hit enter and let's go ahead and make sure that is updated properly. Okay. All right, and finally what we're going to do here is, let's go ahead and change the year to 2018 and we're going to make the country equivalent to Canada. Right, so we've gone through and applied those filters there. So let's go ahead and add that bookmark. And we're going to call this one 2018 Canada sales. Okay, so we have that renamed. Let's just go ahead and make sure it gets updated. All right, so now we have a number of different bookmark steps. Let's actually go ahead and cycle through these bookmarks. So the performance dashboard home will look like this. So this is unfiltered 2020. We can see the filter for 2020 comes in, 19 as well and then 2018 Canada. So this is awesome. So what we've been able to do here is take one single report and set up a number of bookmarks on top of it. So we have a number of different views of that report. Okay, so I'm going to turn my attention momentarily here to the selection pane. So I had to go back to my performance dashboard and we'll notice here that we intended on this $35 million being a target sales on a year by year basis. But we have the total sales across all of our years here showing $89 million. On this first page, I actually don't want to show this KPI. So what I'm going to do is highlight on the performance dashboard home, and I'm going to go and find my KPI here and actually go ahead and hide it. So in the selections pane I can see I've got this little eyeball here, I'm going to say hide the visual and then what I do is go over here to the performance dashboard home and update that visual. Okay, so now that I've done that I can see that this visual is hidden on the performance dashboard home. And as I move through each one of the bookmark pages I can see that the KPI is shown and actually displays different values. So once again, all with one report, I not only have the ability to actually show different filters in it, I can actually turn visualizations on and off if I so choose. Okay, so we've got this all set the way that we want here. So I'm just going to go ahead and close my selection pane off. I'm just going to make sure I save my work here just so I don't lose anything. And now what we want to do here is, let's actually go through and view the actual bookmarks. So I'm going to click this view button right here and what we're going to see is at the very bottom of the screen we're going to get the play arrows back and forth. And this is going to start mimicking a PowerPoint presentation. So I can start off my meeting by saying, "Here's the performance dashboard overview, let's next go to 2020. Now we're going to go to 2019 and go to 2018." So I can cycle through my information just like that, mimicking what would happen in that PowerPoint. The major difference here is now, if somebody did ask me to drill into this information and say, "Hey, can I understand the product sales here for mountain bike 200 black, 46?" I can right click on this, go to my drill through and drill through to the product information and get brought over here. We can have a further discussion. And this is really neat because we can go through and have that further discussion and perhaps then say, "All right, well let's go back to the 2019 sales view," and I can click on that. So I can get back to that view without having to click back bars and remove filters and stuff like that. I can quickly get back to where I want to be. So there is a bit of navigation and navigation with safety built into this if you know how to navigate to this properly. And that comes with a little bit of experience and usage here of the bookmarks and actually trying them out in production scenarios. So this is a really nice way to move away from the world of static PowerPoint presentations where you're presenting information to going ahead and arranging this in a story like fashion using the bookmarks functionality inside of Power BI. Now these bookmarks are built into the actual PBX file that we're going to store here. We will also show you a little bit later on once we get the service, how to create personal bookmarks up in the service as well. And this is really just scratching the tip of the iceberg for bookmarks. There's a lot more of what you can do with bookmarks in terms of really creating compelling stories for our users as we proceed down our Power BI journey. And that brings us to the end of this sub-lesson.