Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Web App

Drill Action in Power BI

Two days ago Microsoft added  some new exciting features to Power BI with the new Power BI Weekly Service Update. The more exciting one is Drill action in Power BI reports. So from now on we’re able to add a number of fields we’d like to have on the reports with a drill path. That means the users can navigate from a level to another. In this short article I show you how to implement a drill action in Power BI. In the “Data Visualisation with Power BI Desktop” I explained how to implement and publish a complete visualisation in Power BI Desktop. In this post I’m going to use the sample we published to the Power BI website as a sample. So if you are not familiar with how to create data visualisations in Power BI Desktop I encourage you to have a look at this.

Adding Drill Action to Sales by Product Category – Column Chart:

  • Login to your Power BI account
  • Open a report that you want to add a drill action to (as a sample I’m using Adventure Works Reseller Sales which I published previously)
  • Click “Edit Report”Drill Action in Power BI 01Select “Sales by Product Category” chart
  • From “Fields” pane expand “Products”
  • Drag and drop Product to Axis right behind the Product CategoryNow you can see the Drill Down Level icon () on the chartClick on the “Drill Down Level” iconVoila!
  • But, wait! There is more. As you noticed another icon () also added to the top right of the chart which simply named “Drill Down”. What is does is that it puts the chart on “Drill Mode”. That means when you turn it on the icon changes to () and now you’re able to click on any data points to drill down to the related data in the lower level. So when you turn the “Drill Mode” on and you click on “Bikes” the chart will drill down to Products level under the Product Category.Click on BikesAdding Drill Action to Sales and Costs by Region – Map:

All the principles are like what we did for the previous chart. So just select the map then drag and drop country on Location, but, this time above the Postal Code.

As we defined a higher level the map is already drilled down a level to Postal Code, so as you can see the “Drill Down Level” icon changed to “Drill Up” ().

Click on the drill up icon to navigate to the higher level.

Now put the chart on drill down mode then click on a data point, for instance Australia to navigate to the lower level of data related to Australia.

It’s just beautiful isn’t it?

Now we can create more exiting data visualisation with drill actions.