- Yooo! Adam Saxton with Guy in a Cube. And in my swapping visuals video, I asked if you wanted to see a mastering bookmarks type video. Just going through all the options cause it can be confusing. And a lot of folks said
they wanted to see it. So, let's do it. (upbeat music) If you're finding us for the first time, be sure to hit that subscribe button, to stay up to date with all the videos from both Patrick and myself. All right bookmarks, what are they? What can you do with them? Why would you even use them? That's what I wanna cover in this video. All right, enough all this talking, you know how we like to do it. Let's head over to my computer. Just a quick look here. Some things that give us some options inside the Power BI. Just so you know like, what
we can do with these items? I can do things like switching visuals, I did a video on this,
the swapping visuals which is what led to this video, so go check that out. You could also do things
like an information panel where you can show and hide things. And I've also got a slicer panel here where I can do some
things, interact with it. But not take up space
in the report itself. These are all things we
can do with a combination of selections, bookmarks, and buttons. That's really the trifecta, the three of these together
bring an app-like experience into your report, which can
open up a ton of possibilities. So let's actually break down a bookmark and what's involved here. First, what we need to do is
we need to see the selection and bookmark area. So we're gonna go to the view tab up top and I'm gonna select
bookmarks and selections. You don't necessarily need the selections but typically whenever I'm
working with bookmarks, I always have selections open as well. The way Patrick and I do
things is we play around with Power BI, we learn a bunch of things. That's how we learn these
items that we present to you. And what I'm about to show you here is something I actually
learned yesterday on Twitter. And I saw a random tweet, and I'm like, Oh my gosh, that's perfect for
the video I'm gonna record. This Mark Beedle ended
up tweeting this out and I'm like, wait, really? Let's check it out. We've got the selection
and the bookmark pane open, one thing you'll notice here is I can collapse visualizations,
I can collapse fields, to give me more space. But there's no collapse on these items. You know, Mark Beedle's tweet, he said, Oh no, just click on the word. I was like, what? Using Power BI for years, I
never knew this, Oh my gosh. And you can do the same
thing with selections. So that's the first tip, you
can hide these if you need to just to get some more space
while you're working on things. That's amazing. Let's actually look at an
existing bookmark that I have and I just wanna highlight
the options that we have here. We can do a bunch of things, we can group bookmarks
together, just for organization. Then there's three main items: Data, Display, and Current page. We're gonna walk through those and then the last section
in here is, all visuals or selected visuals. We're gonna walk through the
implications of that as well. And so one thing you'll notice, when we have these bookmarks,
the slicer pane opens, slicer pane close. And then I can associate these bookmarks to buttons or images to get
that app-like experience and so. I've gotten this open panel
tied to the filter button and then I've also got another
blank button behind here, I can click on that to close it, or I've got another
button here, X to close. So I can assign these bookmarks to items. And that's what give you a
lot of this interactivity. Now, from a data perspective
I've got a line chart visual, as well as a slicer. Let me just create a bookmark. This is gonna give me my default state. So we'll call it data, as we're
working with the data items. I'm gonna do a couple of things. I'm gonna choose a slicer. I'm actually gonna alter a filter. So the filter of color. I'm gonna change this to blue and then I'm gonna go
up a level on my drill. So now I'm just sitting it here. If I go back to overview and
I come back to the data tab, everything's still selected cause I haven't touched a bookmark. Now if I go back to overview
and I select my data bookmark, everything got reset. The slicer, the drill on the visual, as well as the filter itself
is no longer selected. Now, if I uncheck data, so now I'm saying, Don't maintain the data
state with this bookmark. Let's go back and reset that. Change it back to blue. Back to overview, go back to data, everything's still good. Go back to overview, hit my bookmark, and the data selection
still remains the same. So with this, you can control
how you want that visual, the data state of the visuals involved to be maintained or not maintained, depending on what you're looking to do. One thing I find is I don't wanna use data if I'm using bookmarks and whatnot, purely for navigation or
like displaying items. I don't wanna necessarily
change the data state. But there may be cases where you do wanna change the data state. So again, if you wanna
set up a certain view of how you want something to be looked at, I've seen people do this
for maybe the C level execs, so like your CEO or CFO. You just want them to be
able to see a certain view that they prefer. Maybe you wanna include data with that to include the filter states. So they can get that default look. So now let's go look at display. So what I can do here again,
I've just got an image here, I've got our card visual. And what I'm gonna do is create
my default bookmark here. And if we look, everything's
selected by default. If I want to, say, let's hide the visuals and then let's go to the overview page. We'll go back to display. They're still hidden because
I haven't touched a bookmark. Go to overview, display, now they're back. So you can control the visual state. So like, are they hidden, are they shown. The other thing that's interesting here that I can do, is if I go to a visual, I can say spotlight, so it kinda highlights that visual. If I go and update the bookmark, and then we go, so now I'm back to my default. Go to overview, go back to display, everything's good. Go back to overview, hit the bookmark. It's gonna maintain the spotlight as part of the display state. Just nice ways that you can control what's actually happening
with that bookmark. So next, current page. Let's create a bookmark
here, call it current page. So the default is, we're
gonna have everything here. I may wanna say, look, let's
start it off as hidden. If we go back to overview,
again current page, it's good. And then if we select
the current page visual it's gonna take me to that page. You probably saw this
with the other items. But here's the interesting thing that may give you a
scenario that you wanna do or like why you would wanna
untoggle current page. Maybe you don't want that
page to go there right away, but you want something to
happen on a different page. Let me go ahead and uncheck current page and then what we're gonna do is we're gonna hide the visual here. So if I go to overview, I
go back to current page, it's still hidden. We go to overview and
I'll select current page, it doesn't switch the page, but it still unhid the visuals. So I can affect other
pages or my current page without actually swapping. Which could be interesting. There may be some things
you could think of where you wanna do that? And this allows you that
flexibility of altering other pages without
actually going to that page. So that covered data
display and current page. We also looked at grouping. The other thing here is the all visuals and selected visuals. This one is the complicated one. What I have here is I
got six shaped visuals. So what I wanna do is control
which ones are hidden, which one are shown. What I wanna do here is say,
let's hide the triangles, let's create one and call, show circles. Then I wanna do another
one where they're hidden. We'll say, hide circles. Now what's interesting here is, let me go ahead and uncheck these. We'll do the same thing for triangles. So I can show and I can hide triangles. I can show and I can hide circles. Now where the problem is, is let's say I wanna
add in another visual. Let's go to insert, I'm gonna do shape and I'm gonna add a rectangle. Let's put this guy over here. So I've got this other visual here. But now I wanna show the circles and then I wanna hide the circles. I wanna show the triangles,
I wanna hide the triangles. Everything's great,
everything's working exactly as I wanted. But now, let's say that I
wanna hide the rectangle. There we go, everything's hidden. Let's go to show triangles. Why is that showing? And the reason for this is because I have all visuals
selected for the bookmark. Which means it's covering
everything on the page. It's not independent to that given set that you're trying to control. In this scenario I wanna
control the circles and the triangles
independently of one another. I don't want them all to be adjusted. So, here what I can do is, let's go back and do selected visuals
on all of these bookmarks. Here's the catch. And this is why it's a little confusing. To affect these bookmarks, you have to have the
actual visuals selected. This also means that if you
wanna include other visuals, they all have to be selected. So in this case, let's
say I just want circles to control circles. So for this case circles
are hidden right now. So I'm gonna select all three of them and I'm gonna update hide circles. And now I'm gonna show them. They're still selected and
I'm gonna update show circles. So now, if I toggle between them they're now not affecting anything else. And we do the same thing for triangles. So now, if I hide the rectangle shape. So if we go between the
triangles, that's fine, I can hide and show the circles. Everything's great. What if I wanted to do just the circles and the triangles together. So if I'm showing circles, I don't want it to show triangles. So here, this is what I mean by you have to select all six visuals that
are part of this selection. In this case, if I want circles shown, I don't want triangles shown, so I'll do an update on show circles and make sure the selection is there. Update, all six are selected, because all six are gonna
be part of this bookmark. And let's do the same thing. I'm gonna hide the circles
and show the triangles. So again, all six are selected. Gonna update the show triangles. Now if I go between show
circles and show triangles, these are great. Hide triangles only affects the triangles, not the circles. So if I'm showing circles
and I hide triangles, circles aren't doing anything. Show triangles, show
circles, they're swapping. Now if I bring the rectangle back in, again, the rectangle is not
affected, so that's great. So all visuals versus selected
visuals really give you that fine tune approach
about what you wanna do. Let me show you a real example of this. I'm back to my overview page. I'm going to swap the decomp tree. So I swap those visuals and now I wanna show
the information panel. (gasping) Did you see what just happened? So I'm gonna go back,
swap the decomp tree, pay attention to the decomp tree when I go to the information panel. It's changing it back. That is because my information panel on the open is saying all visuals. On the information panel, I don't necessarily wanted to change the other state if the
user just wants more info. Let's leave their selections
the way they were. And so the way to do this, is I need to go to the actual info image. This is the item that is selected here. I'm gonna change this to selected visual and I'm gonna update. And now I'm gonna go back
to info panel closed. Gonna change it to selected visuals. Make sure the info panel is selected and I'm gonna update. So now, I'm gonna do the decomp tree, if I show the image, again, pay attention to the decomp tree. Should stay the same. Do the operation on the
visual you care about without affecting the other items. There may be cases
where you wanna do that. This just gives you that flexibility in order to control the
experience for the end user. So think about what it is
you want the user to see. And then go ahead and
implement the bookmarks. The other thing I will
say about the bookmarks and especially when we
talk about all visuals versus selected visuals, all of the visuals that's
gonna be part of this, make sure those are all in place. You're not tweaking, you're
not adding, or whatnot, cause that can get confusing too, especially if you have to
update a bunch of bookmarks. You're gonna have to
have a matrix just to see like what's involved with which bookmark to keep track of it. I've seen some reports with 200 bookmarks. It can get nuts. I know that was kind of a long video but there was a lot of details
to go through with bookmarks. They can be incredibly
powerful to take your report to the next level. Let me know in the comments
below what you think, what's your experience
been with bookmarks. Are you using them today? I wanna know! Let me know
in the comments below. If you like this video, be sure to hit that big thumbs up button. Smash it if you so desire. If it's your first time here, The Guy in a Cube, hit
that subscribe button. And as always, from
both Patrick and myself, thank you so much for watching. Keep being awesome and we'll
see you in the next video.
