Power BI Bookmarks: What are they? And how to use them!

Power BI bookmark is a feature you can use to capture the view of a report page and use it to share insights and build stories.

As mentioned earlier, it was a feature that was only available on Power BI Desktop. Eventually, Microsoft made it available on Power BI Service as well.

When you make a bookmark, you save different elements of that report including:

• The current page
• Filters
• Slicers (including the type and state)
• Visual selection state
• Sort order
• Drill location
• Visibility of an object
• The focus or spotlight modes of any visual

Before creating a bookmark, let’s condition our report page first.

We’ll be using the “Retail Analysis Sample” — District Monthly Sales report for this example.

Let’s say you want to create a bookmark highlighting date relevant to “Allan Guinot”, a district manager, on the month of “January”:

To create a bookmark, simply click ‘Bookmarks’ on the upper-right corner and select ‘Add a personal bookmark’:

You can also name your bookmark or leave its default name.

If you would like to see this report view every time you open this report page, just check the ‘Make default view’.

If all is good, ‘Save’ your bookmark:

The first step in creating a bookmark in Power BI Desktop is a bit different.

To maintain consistency, we’ll be using the same dataset, settings, and filter as the previous section using the “Retail Analysis Sample”:

As you’ve noticed, there’s no ‘Bookmarks’ icon you can easily click unlike in Power BI Service.

What you have to do now is show the bookmarks pane.

Click ‘View’ on the tab list and check ‘Bookmarks Pane’:

Immediately, the bookmarks pane will appear between the filters pane and visualizations pane.

To add a bookmark, simply click ‘Add’ on the bookmarks pane:

Bookmarks aren’t only used as a way to preserve your current report page state. You can also use them to present your report in a slide show.

Let’s say that you added 2 more bookmarks in Power BI Service.

To see the bookmarks pane in Power BI Service which looks similar to the desktop version, click ‘Bookmarks’ on the upper-right corner and then ‘Show more bookmarks’:

To start the slide show, make sure you’re on ‘Personal bookmarks’ and press ‘View’:

You’re now on bookmarks viewing mode. To go through the slides, click on the directional buttons at the bottom.

If you would like to exit the presentation, press the ‘X’ button or the ‘Exit’ button which now replaced the ‘View’ button on the bookmarks pane:

Power BI bookmarks are a great way to preserve your progress or interesting insights and use them for presentation purposes. The best part is, it only takes less than 2 seconds to make one.