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Consultant KB for Microsoft Power BI: semantic models, DAX and modelling, Power Query and dataflows, reports and visuals, the service and workspaces, capacity and performance, embedding and integration, governance and security, ALM and deployment, and licensing, plus cross-cutting decision guides. Scoped to Power BI, with Microsoft Fabric covered where it touches Power BI directly. Implementation notes, configuration decisions and the gotchas that bite on real projects. Populated by the daily author agent from the Power BI release plans, docs repo and product blog, plus the author's own consultant notes.

power-bi/04-reports-and-visuals/feature-bookmarks-and-interactions.md
feature-bookmarks-and-interactions.mdv1 · history
CurrentApplies to BothUpdated last monthSource Microsoft Learn ↗

What it does

A bookmark captures the state of a report page — filters, slicers, selection, sort, drill position, object visibility — so a reader can get straight back to it. Visual interactions control how selecting a data point in one visual affects the others on the page.

Key facts

  • Two kinds of bookmark: report bookmarks, which need edit permission and travel with the report, and personal bookmarks, which any reader can create in the service.
  • A bookmark stores the current page, filters, slicers (including slicer type and state), visual selection and cross-highlight state, sort order, drill location, object visibility from the Selection pane, and focus or spotlight mode.
  • Each bookmark has switchable properties: Data (filters and slicers), Display (visibility and spotlight), Current page, and All visuals versus Selected visuals.
  • Visuals cross-filter and cross-highlight each other by default. Edit interactions (Format > Edit interactions) sets Filter, Highlight or None per target visual, per source visual.
  • Line charts, scatter charts and maps can be cross-filtered but not cross-highlighted.
  • Drilling a visual has no effect on other visuals by default. Format > Apply drill down filters to > Entire page changes that.
  • Bookmarks can be grouped, reordered by drag and drop, played as a slide show, and bound to buttons, shapes and images. A bookmark navigator generates the whole button set from a group automatically.
  • Bookmarks don't capture position. Move a visual after creating a bookmark and selecting the bookmark won't move it back.

When to use / skip

Bookmarks are the right tool for show/hide navigation — swapping a chart for a table, revealing a filter panel, stepping through a narrative in a review meeting. They're the wrong tool for anything a slicer or drillthrough page can do, because every bookmark is a saved state that has to be maintained by hand when the page changes. A report with thirty bookmarks is a maintenance problem wearing a nice suit. On interactions, the default cross-filtering is right more often than people assume; change it where a visual is context rather than analysis, such as a KPI band that should always show the unfiltered total.

Configuration decisions

  • Which bookmark properties each bookmark actually needs. For view-switching bookmarks, turn Data off so selecting one doesn't wipe the reader's filters.
  • All visuals versus Selected visuals, which decides whether a bookmark is a page-level state or a local toggle.
  • Whether navigation is bookmark buttons, a bookmark navigator, page navigation, or plain page tabs.
  • Interaction matrix per page: which visuals filter, which highlight, which are set to None.
  • Whether drill applies to the visual only or to the whole page.
  • Whether readers are told personal bookmarks exist — it takes a lot of "can you save this view for me" requests off your plate.

Gotchas

  • Adding a slicer to a page after creating bookmarks clears that slicer in the existing bookmarks. You'll be updating every one of them.
  • Changing visibility in the Selection pane while bookmarks exist reverts visibility to the default. You have to right-click the bookmark and Update afterwards, and it's easy to forget on one of twelve.
  • Bookmarks with Data left on reset the user's filters when they switch views. This is the most common bookmark complaint in the wild and it's a one-checkbox fix.
  • Slicers filter whether visible or not, so a hidden slicer restored by a bookmark changes the numbers invisibly.
  • Ungrouping a bookmark deletes the whole group, not just that bookmark. Rebuilding a group means re-selecting every member.
  • Custom visuals may not support bookmarks properly, and there's nothing you can do about it except pick a different visual.

Consultant notes

  • Test bookmark navigation with a keyboard before sign-off. Microsoft's own accessibility checklist calls this out, and bookmark-driven navigation is where keyboard-only users get stranded.
  • Name bookmarks for what they show, not "Bookmark 4". Someone will be editing these in two years with no context.
  • Keep a short note of which bookmarks depend on which hidden objects. That relationship is invisible in the file and it's the first thing that breaks.
  • Where a client wants a lot of view-switching, consider whether a field parameter or a slicer does the job with no saved state to maintain.

Sticky note: recheck every bookmark after any page rework — visibility and slicer changes silently invalidate them.

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