Taking Buttons in Power BI Desktop to the Next Level

yeah what's up I'm Adam and I'm Amanda and we are gonna look how buttons can improve interactivity and the overall experience of your reports stay tuned if you're finding is 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 Amanda we are going to look at buttons you've got some cool stuff you want to show us to really like just highlight how we can improve the usability of reports right yes what's the what's the big reason why you want to do this what are you seeing um a couple of things I find that a lot of people they're designing reports and there's a lot of interaction involved in them and being able to think about that upfront and build really beautiful easy-to-use experiences for your consumers is really important for their satisfaction and also I've been noticing that whenever I do my monthly videos and I do on the power bi YouTube channel that I get like questions about how I built out the reports that I have on I use it up on my videos yeah because they look awesome and the interactivity is really cool so people want to know right alright enough of all this talking let's head over to your computer and see what we got yes okay so if anyone watches my monthly video that I do for the power bi desktop this report will look very familiar to you and a lot of people have interest in this left navigation here this is a navigation element that lets you navigate between the various pages of the report and everyone always wants to know how it's been built out and it's actually really easy to do using our buttons feature so buttons they are in the top area of the ribbon here and we have a couple of pre built-in ones like with arrows or a back button things like that but the most powerful one is this blank one which is what we're using here life is powerful yes oh yes it's very powerful because you can make it say whatever you want to do whatever you want like that so these is a button that was originally blank and you'll see when building out the visuals you have the buttons you have various controls available to you you can add text to it so in this case I have the name for each of the pages of my report so those are like the the premium skews right p1 p2 wrong wrong p1 you can also if you want we have a few built-in icons that you can add to your buttons as well in my case I don't want any icons available I just want the words deferred each of the pages and you can also control the outline and the fill and the nice thing about this is that you can for each of these controls you can actually set it for what it looks like just sitting on the report and also the hover and pressed state for the button as well so you can see here that for each of these buttons there is a hover state available so as I hover over it it darkens up which lets me know indicates to me that I can actually click on it and and whenever I press down on one of the buttons it turns blue which you know gives me a nice feeling as I'm interacting with the report letting me know the Cape yes this is a button and I pressed it and so you can design your buttons with each of these three different states to make it really feel like it's not just like something static on the report it's a really highly interactive and once you've designed how your buttons look it's actually really easy to also set up that navigation effect as well so all that the buttons are doing are referencing bookmarks so if I select the one that's going to go to page two I'll see that this action card is turned on and that's where you set up what any button is gonna do when it's clicked on so so our bookmarks the key like the magic sauce of how this works in this case yes okay buttons can do more than point to bookmarks they can also open up a Q&A dialog or go to a web URL anywhere on the Internet but in this case bookmarks are the magic sauce nice and so all you have to do is take a bookmark for each of the different pages so I'm go to page two I can go and open up my bookmarks pane and to take a book work for that page and something a lot of people don't know is that bookmarks of course they know that bookmarks can you know stays a lot of interesting stuff about the report cross highlighting filter states if something is visible or not has a lot of power behind it but you can control what that bookmark is saving at any given time so I can in this case I just want to use the bookmarks for navigation so I'm going to open for that bookmark turn off the data related stuff okay so that part right there and I've had this conversation with a few customers that part is key because some people get into this funky state of whoa I hit this button or whatever and like also not my slicers like changed on me yes yes so this will allow you to make sure that when you move to the next page it's not also changing the filter statement this is just changing the the page it's the same with the display display is things like we have a feature called spotlighting which dims everything else that's included in display and also visibility is included in display so I'm going to turn those off as well so now this bookmark is solely moving between the pages and then I can go back over to the first page and for this button Oh make sure that in the action card I work for seeing a bookmark and I can pick the bookmark I just added as its navigation point and when I click on it it moves me to that page nice so all you have to do is set up a bookmark per page of your report and tie it to a button for each of those pages awesome what if I have a hundred pages maybe not maybe you should engage us into your report okay maybe that's a discussion for another job there's another video my thing all right just asking just asking all right so that's awesome so patient navigation is cool yes how do we take this to the next level because we like to do that on Guiana cube well if you take these same concepts that we I showed here for page navigation you can also do something similar to have elements change within your report as users click on things so if I jumped to another page you can see in this report that I have here that I have these cards showing different information and you know like how many leads do I have how are the profile views happening on my social media account I have all these different cards that show information in cards generally are static you know you can't click on them that you don't need to do anything so why don't we take advantage of that and make these into interactive elements you do that you can't so I have all my cards and all I did was I layered a button on top of it this is the magic of the blank button yes nothing visible to it and if I open up the formatting pane it's so to be clear the buttons that we saw for the page navigation those were blank also but we added text to them yes yes I'm sure using blank yes we're using blank though text is off in this case because I want it to be transparent there's no outline the only fill is on hover so you can see that whatever if I go into here the there's a transparency to the fill as well and it gets it changes based off of if I'm hovering on the card or not again it gives you that nice ability to make things actually feel interactive by taking advantage of that hover state nice and in this case we're again linked into bookmarks but the bookmark is actually changing the visual that I'm seeing to the right and so each of these cards is a different metric and I want to be able to switch the visual to show that metric that I just clicked on got it and so again each of these buttons it's just pointing to a bookmark that is changing the visibility there's many visuals layered there I'm hiding and showing them nice that's that's tricky that is a tricky thing and it really can improve what we can actually show cuz I know a lot of folks will be like how do I change accesses dynamically on the roads water how do I get that different state and feel and this is a great way that a great way to go about doing it all right so I know like doing this with bookmarks I've done this myself I've seen other folks do it and sometimes you may get into trouble just because you're dealing with these layers and things can get how would you if you're doing this and you get frustrated because of layering how it's a quick way that we can go and fix that so we have in power bi we've built in the selection pane and this pane is incredibly useful you can see here it lists everything that you have in this report for in the Z order that you that the things are so you can see here that you know this button is on top and as you click it it will select the object on the campus as well so you can see where it is and the things at the top of the pane are higher up in the Z order and you can just drag them around to change their ordering as well nice this is also where you change the visibility of things as well so if you can't find something always open the selection pane and you can see if there's any hidden objects on the page and if you need to just for keeping track of it I believe we just had a recent thing that went anywhere you can just double click and change the title yes yes so so for this case this buttons just named a button because it doesn't have a title yeah is that so you know description yes very helpful so I could just double click here and change it to search button and if I do this for my all of the objects on my page it will become a lot easier to manage that is yes awesome we won't pass this off to the viewers what do you what question do you have for them so we are thinking a lot about all these different interaction methods with with reporting and so you've seen how we've designed some stuff for our reports I would love to know after you've seen this are you guys doing something similar are there different interaction methods you're building into your reports we would love to know what you're trying to do so we can make it easier yep just leave that down in the comments below and let us know if you liked this video be sure to hit that big thumbs up button smash it so desire if it's your first time here hit that subscribe button and as always from both Patrick myself and Amanda thank you so much for watching keep being awesome and we'll see you in the next video

Channel: Guy in a Cube

Views: 280,169

Keywords: power bi desktop, power bi desktop buttons, power bi desktop navigate between pages, power bi desktop tutorial, power bi desktop tutorial for beginners, power bi, power bi report design, power bi reports, power bi reports examples, power bi reports tutorial, power bi tutorial, power bi tutorial for beginners, business intelligence, powerbi

Id: hEAtbGrlKhY

Length: 10min 48sec (648 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 25 2019