Drillthrough in Power BI: detail pages, buttons and fixes

A summary page shows sales by product; someone wants to see everything about one product. Drillthrough in Power BI takes them from the summary to a detail page that's filtered to the item they picked, and back again. It's different from drill down, which only moves through the levels of a hierarchy inside one visual.

Pause animation

1. 1Right-click "Bikes" on the summary chart
2. 2Choose Drill through > Product details
3. 3The detail page opens filtered to Bikes
4. 4Back returns to the summary

Build the detail page

1. In Power BI Desktop, select + at the bottom of the canvas to add a page, and rename it for its purpose, such as Product details (right-click the tab and select Rename Page).
2. With the new page selected, scroll down the Visualizations pane to the Drillthrough section.
3. Drag the field people will drill on, such as Product[Product Name], from the Data pane into the Drillthrough filters well ("Add drillthrough fields here").
4. Power BI adds a Back button to the page automatically. Keep it.
5. Add the visuals that make sense for a single item: a card with the product name, a table of its orders, a line chart of its sales over time.

You can add more than one field to the well; the detail page then filters on all of them, such as a product and a region.

Two ways in: right-click and a button

Right-click. On any page, right-click a data point in a visual that uses the same field (a bar for one product), choose Drill through, then the page name. Visual tooltips can also show Drill through in their actions footer when it's turned on, so people don't have to right-click.

A button. Right-click is easy to miss, so Microsoft's guidance suggests helping people discover drillthrough. A button makes it obvious:

1. Select Insert > Buttons and choose a button.
2. In Format button, turn on Action, set Type to Drill through, and choose the page in Destination.
3. Give it a tooltip that says what to select first, such as "Select a product, then select here".

The button stays inactive until the reader has selected what the detail page needs (for example, one product), then becomes active. Buttons have a Disabled state you can style, so it looks clearly unavailable until then.

Across reports

To drill from one report to another in the same workspace, turn on Cross-report drillthrough in the target report's settings, use the same field names and data types in both reports, and publish both to the same workspace. It only works in the Power BI service, not in Desktop.

Make it feel finished

When Drill through doesn't appear

• No Drill through option on right-click: the visual doesn't use the field in the target page's drillthrough well, or uses it summarized (counted or summed). Use the same field, unsummarized.
• The button never becomes active: the reader hasn't selected everything the page needs, or the button's Type or Destination is wrong.
• The page opens but shows the wrong data: check the relationships between the tables; the filter on the drillthrough field has to reach the tables your visuals use.
• Cross-report drillthrough fails: the reports aren't in the same workspace, the field names or types differ, or the setting is off in the target report.
• The pages are in a different order in the menu after publishing: Microsoft notes the service may not follow the tab order Desktop uses.

For headline numbers on the summary page, see designing a KPI card; to let readers switch what a chart shows before they drill, see field parameters.

Sources

• Drillthrough in Power BI reports — Microsoft Learn
• Use report page drillthrough (guidance) — Microsoft Learn
• Create and configure buttons in Power BI reports — Microsoft Learn
• Identify and use buttons in the Power BI service — Microsoft Learn
• Visual tooltips in Power BI: drill actions — Microsoft Learn
• Use drill mode to explore visuals — Microsoft Learn