How to Add Bookmark to Slicer in Power BI

Creating a Power BI report that feels less like a spreadsheet and more like a custom application is all about smart, interactive design. A powerful way to achieve this is by connecting specific slicer settings to bookmarks, allowing your users to flip between pre-defined views with a single click. This guide will walk you through exactly how to set up bookmarks that save your slicer selections, transforming your report into a guided analytical experience.

Why Use Bookmarks with Slicers?

While users can always interact with slicers manually, linking them to bookmarks offers a few key advantages that elevate your report from good to great.

• Guided Analytics: You can create buttons for specific views like "Q4 Performance," "North America Region," or "Top Selling Products." This directs your audience to the most important insights without forcing them to hunt through various filter combinations.
• Simplified User Experience: Instead of asking a busy executive to click three different slicers to get the daily sales overview, you can give them one button labeled "Daily Sales." It reduces friction and makes your data more accessible.
• Report Storytelling: Bookmarks allow you to create a narrative within your report. You can set up a series of buttons that walk the user through a story, from a high-level overview to a detailed analysis of a specific segment, all in a controlled sequence.
• Consistency: By providing pre-set views, you ensure everyone is looking at the same slice of data, which is perfect for team review meetings where consistency is crucial.

Getting Prepared: What You'll Need

Before you start bookmarking, make sure you have the basics in place within Power BI Desktop. The process is straightforward, but it helps to have your canvas ready.

First, ensure your report page has all the necessary visuals and at least one slicer. The slicer should be working and correctly filtering your data visuals.

Next, you'll need two essential panes open: the Bookmarks pane and the Selection pane. If they aren't visible, you can easily enable them by going to the View tab in the Power BI ribbon and checking the boxes for "Bookmarks" and "Selection." These panes will appear on the right side of your screen and are your primary tools for this task.

Step-by-Step: Adding Bookmarks to Slicers

Let's walk through the process of creating a simple bookmark set that controls a "Year" slicer. For this example, imagine you have a sales dashboard and want to provide buttons to quickly switch between 2023 and 2024 sales data.

Step 1: Set Your First Slicer State and Create a Bookmark

This is your starting point. You need to capture the initial view you want to save. For our example, let's create a bookmark for the year 2023.

1. Click on your "Year" slicer within the Power BI report and select "2023." Your other visuals on the page should update to reflect this selection.
2. With the slicer set, go to the Bookmarks pane and click the Add button. A new bookmark will appear with a generic name like "Bookmark 1."
3. Double-click on the new bookmark to rename it. Let's call it "View 2023 Sales." Descriptive names are your best friend here, especially as your reports grow in complexity.

Now, we need to configure how this bookmark behaves. This is the most crucial part of the process.

1. Click the three dots (...) next to your "View 2023 Sales" bookmark to open the options menu.
2. Pay close attention to the checkboxes: Data, Display, and Current Page.
3. Click the three dots (...) again and select Update to save these settings. It's a good habit to update the bookmark after any changes to its settings or the slicer it controls.

Step 2: Set and Create Your Second Slicer State

Now, we'll repeat the process for our second desired view: the year 2024.

1. Go back to your "Year" slicer and change the selection from "2023" to "2024." You'll see your visuals update to show 2024 data.
2. In the Bookmarks pane, click Add again.
3. Rename this new bookmark to something clear, like "View 2024 Sales."
4. Just like before, click the three dots, ensure the Data checkbox is selected, and click Update.

You have now successfully captured two different slicer states as separate bookmarks. You can test them by clearing your slicer, then clicking on the bookmark names in the Bookmarks pane. You should see the report instantly filter to the correct year.

Step 3: Create a "Reset" Bookmark (Highly Recommended)

Users love an easy way to get back to the default view. A "Reset" or "All Years" bookmark is perfect for this.

1. Clear all selections in your "Year" slicer so that it shows data for all years.
2. In the Bookmarks pane, click Add.
3. Rename this bookmark to "Reset slicers" or "Show All Years."
4. Again, ensure its settings are correct (Data box checked) and click Update.

Bringing It All Together: Connecting Bookmarks to Buttons

Bookmarks are invisible to your end-users until you link them to something they can click on. Buttons are the cleanest and most intuitive way to do this.

Step 1: Insert Your Buttons

1. Navigate to the Insert tab in the Power BI ribbon.
2. Click on Buttons and select Blank from the dropdown. This gives you a clean button you can fully customize.
3. Position the blank button on your report canvas. Repeat this process so you have one button for each bookmark ("View 2023," "View 2024," and "Reset").

Step 2: Format and Label Your Buttons

1. Select your first button. This will open the Format pane on the right.
2. Under Button Style, find the Text section and switch the toggle to "On."
3. In the text box, type "View 2023 Sales." You can also adjust the font, color, and size to match your report's design.
4. Repeat this for the other buttons, labeling them "View 2024 Sales" and "Reset" respectively.

Step 3: Assign an Action to Each Button

This is where we connect the dots and make the magic happen.

1. Select the "View 2023 Sales" button.
2. In the Format pane, find the Action section and turn it "On."
3. Set the Type dropdown to Bookmark.
4. A second dropdown, labeled Bookmark, will appear. Select your "View 2023 Sales" bookmark from this list.
5. That's it! Repeat this action assignment for your other two buttons, linking the "View 2024 Sales" button to the "View 2024 Sales" bookmark and the "Reset" button to the "Reset slicers" bookmark.

Now, exit any editing modes. In Power BI Desktop, you'll need to hold Ctrl and click the buttons to test them. In the Power BI Service (once published), a simple click is all it takes. You now have a fully interactive set of report controls.

Advanced Tips and Best Practices

Once you are comfortable with the basic workflow, you can add more sophistication to your slicer bookmarks.

• Clean Up Your UI with the Selection Pane: Don't want the slicer itself to be visible to users? You can incorporate its visibility into the bookmark. To do this, use the Selection pane. Click the "eye" icon next to an object's name to hide or show it. Set its visibility state before you create or update the bookmark. This is great for creating a "Filter Panel" that appears and disappears on command.
• Use "Bookmark Groups": If you have dozens of bookmarks, the Bookmarks pane can get messy. Select multiple bookmarks and click "Group" to organize them into folders (e.g., "Slicer Controls," "Page Navigation"). This is purely for organizational cleanliness and makes managing complex reports much easier.
• Apply to "Selected visuals" Only: In the bookmark's option menu, you can choose if the bookmark applies to "All visuals" or "Selected visuals." This allows you to create bookmarks that only update certain charts while leaving others unchanged, offering a layer of granular control for dense dashboards.

Final Thoughts

Connecting slicer filters to bookmarks is a game-changer for building user-friendly and guided Power BI reports. It transitions your dashboard from a static canvas of data into an interactive app, enabling your audience to get the answers they need quickly and consistently without having to master every filter and option themselves.

While mastering advanced Power BI techniques is powerful, sometimes you just need to connect your data and get answers without spending hours in menus and configuration panels. We built Graphed for exactly that. You can connect your data sources in seconds and use simple, natural language to create the dashboards you need. Instead of manually setting up slicers, views, and actions, you can just ask, “show me a dashboard comparing 2023 vs 2024 sales by region,” and have a real-time dashboard ready to go in under a minute.