How to Create Buttons in Power BI Dashboard

Creating interactive elements is one of the best ways to make your Power BI reports feel less like static pages and more like dynamic applications. Buttons are the star of the show here, allowing you to guide users, add navigation, and perform actions without them ever needing to touch a complex filter pane. This guide will walk you through exactly how to add, configure, and use buttons to seriously upgrade your Power BI dashboards.

What Exactly Are Buttons in Power BI?

In Power BI, a button is an interactive shape you can add to your report canvas. When a user clicks it, it triggers a specific action that you’ve predefined. Think of them as the control panel for your dashboard.

Instead of forcing users to navigate through page tabs at the bottom or manually clear a series of complicated filters, you can provide clear, intuitive buttons that handle the job with one click. This small addition makes a huge difference in user experience, especially for stakeholders who might not be as familiar with Power BI's interface.

You can use buttons to:

• Navigate between different report pages.
• Link to external websites or documents.
• Drill through to more detailed data views.
• Apply or clear all slicers on a page.
• Trigger bookmarks that show a specific state of your report.

Creating Your First Button: A Step-by-Step Guide

Placing a button onto your report is incredibly straightforward. It’s what you do after placing it that brings the magic. Let's start with the basics.

Step 1: Insert a Button

First, open your report in Power BI Desktop. In the main ribbon at the top, navigate to the Insert tab. You'll see a 'Buttons' dropdown menu. Click on it, and you'll get a list of pre-made button shapes like 'Left arrow', 'Right arrow', and 'Help', as well as a 'Blank' option to create something completely custom.

For the most flexibility, let's start by selecting Blank. A simple rectangle will appear on your report canvas. You can click and drag it to position it where you want and resize it using the drag handles.

Step 2: Format and Style Your Button

With your new button selected, the Format pane will appear on the right side of your screen. This is where you control every aspect of the button's appearance. Let's look at the most important sections.

Button Style

Under the 'Button' section (Visual tab), expand the 'Style' options. This area controls the button's core look and feel across different states (which we'll cover later).

• Text: Here, you can add the label for your button. Type in something clear like "View Sales Details". You can also adjust font type, size, color, and add padding to position the text perfectly within the button.
• Icon: Instead of text, you can use an icon. Power BI has a few built-in options, or you can use your own custom image.
• Fill: This is the button's background color. Choose a color that fits your report's design theme.
• Border: Toggles a border (outline) on or off and lets you control its color and thickness.
• Shadow & Glow: These options add depth and visual effects to help your button stand out on the page.

For our example, let's add the text "View Sales Details," choose a complementary fill color, and turn the border on.

Making Your Button Do Something: Adding an Action

A good-looking button is nice, but it's useless until you tell it what to do. The real power comes from the 'Action' card in the Format pane.

Select your button, and with the 'Button' settings open in the right-hand Format pane, you'll see a toggle for Action. Switch it on.

Now, a new set of options will appear, starting with a dropdown menu called 'Type.' This dropdown lists all the possible actions your button can perform. Let's break down the most essential ones.

Common Button Actions Explained

1. Page Navigation

This is arguably the most common use for buttons. It allows you to create a user-friendly navigation menu inside your report, so viewers don’t have to hunt for the small page tabs at the bottom.

• How to set it up: Select 'Page navigation' as the Type. A new 'Destination' dropdown will appear. Simply select the report page you want the button to link to from the list.
• Example: You could create a 'Home' button on every page that links back to your main summary dashboard, making it easy for users to reorient themselves.

2. Bookmark

Bookmarks are one of Power BI's most powerful features. They save a "snapshot" of a report page's state — including all filters, slicers, and visual drill-down levels. You can then use a button to call that specific state.

• How to create a bookmark: First, go to the View tab in the Power BI ribbon and check the box for 'Bookmarks' to open the Bookmarks pane. Adjust your filters and slicers on the page to get the exact view you want to save. For example, filter a chart to only show data for Q4. In the Bookmarks pane, click 'Add' and give your new bookmark a clear name like "Q4 Sales View."
• How to link it to a button: Now, go back to your button's 'Action' settings. Set the Type to 'Bookmark' and the 'Bookmark' destination to "Q4 Sales View". When a user clicks this button, the page will instantly apply the filters you saved.

3. Clear all slicers

If your report page has multiple slicers for things like date, region, and product category, users can quickly get lost in the data. A "Reset" button improves usability immensely.

• How to set it up: Simply select 'Clear all slicers' as the Type. There are no other settings to configure.
• Example: Place a button with the text "Reset Filters" at the top of a heavily filtered dashboard page. When a user is done exploring a particular data set, they can click it to instantly reset all slicers to their default state and start fresh.

4. Web URL

Use this action to link your button to any external webpage. This is perfect for linking to source data, providing documentation, or leading users to another reporting tool.

• How to set it up: Choose 'Web URL' as the Type. In the 'Web URL' field, simply paste the full URL you want the button to open (e.g., https://www.yourcompany.com/support).
• Example: You could add a 'Help' button with a question mark icon that links to an internal wiki explaining the data sources and metrics used in the report.

Advanced Tip: Using Button States for a Better User Experience

For a button to feel truly professional, it should provide visual feedback to the user. Power BI allows you to customize a button's appearance for different interaction "states."

In the 'Style' section of the Format settings, you'll see an 'Apply settings to' dropdown. By default, it’s set to 'Default'. You can change this to modify the button’s appearance for specific states:

• On hover: How the button looks when the user's mouse is hovering over it. A common practice is to make the fill color slightly lighter or darker to signal that it's clickable.
• On press: How the button looks at the moment it’s clicked. You could add an inner shadow or bold the text to provide click feedback.
• Disabled: How the button looks when its action is unavailable (this state is more advanced and often context-dependent with bookmarks).

By customizing these simple states, your report will look and feel much more polished and intuitive to your end-users.

Best Practices for Using Buttons in Your Reports

• Be Consistent: Keep your navigation buttons in the same place on every page (e.g., a header or sidebar). This consistency helps users build muscle memory and navigate your report with ease.
• Use Clear Labels and Icons: Don't make users guess what a button does. Use explicit labels like "Go to Details" or pair vague labels with universally understood icons (like a house for 'Home').
• Don't Overcrowd: Buttons are powerful, but don't add them for every conceivable action. A clustered interface can be just as confusing as an absent one. Prioritize the most important and common actions for your users.
• Leverage Tooltips: Under the 'Action' card, you can write custom tooltip text. This is a small text box that appears when a user hovers over the button, giving them more context. For example, a tooltip for a bookmark button might say, "Click to view sales data filtered for the last 30 days."

Final Thoughts

Buttons transform your Power BI report from a simple "page of charts" into a guided and interactive experience. By thinking carefully about the user journey, you can use these simple elements to control navigation, reveal insights, and dramatically improve the usability of your dashboards for everyone from data analysts to executives.

Building effective dashboards in complex tools like Power BI can be a time-consuming process of dragging, dropping, and configuring every visual element. At Graphed, we're focused on streamlining this. We built an AI data analyst that allows you to connect all your marketing and sales data sources — like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce — and then create entire dashboards just by describing what you want in plain English. Instead of manually creating buttons and setting up actions, you can create reports in seconds, enabling your creativity without the clicks and roadblocks, with Graphed.