How to Group Bookmarks in Power BI

Bookmarks in Power BI are a fantastic way to capture report states, but they can quickly lead to a long, messy list that's hard for anyone to navigate. Fortunately, you can organize them into clean, logical collections using groups. This article will walk you through exactly how to create and manage bookmark groups in Power BI to make your reports cleaner and more user-friendly.

A Quick Refresher: What Are Bookmarks In Power BI?

Before diving into groups, let's briefly touch on what a bookmark does. In Power BI, a bookmark captures the current state of a report page. This "state" includes several key components:

• Filters and Slicers: Any filters applied to the page, specific visuals, or through slicers are saved.
• Visual States: The sort order of a table, a drill-down level in a matrix, or the visibility of an object is captured.
• Page Navigation: A bookmark is always tied to a specific report page.

In essence, bookmarks let you save custom views of your data so you or your end-users can return to them with a single click. Think of them as shortcuts to specific insights, allowing you to highlight different stories within the same report without creating dozens of separate pages.

Why Should You Group Bookmarks? The Benefits of Staying Organized

If you only have two or three bookmarks, you might not see the need for grouping. But as your reports grow in complexity, your list of bookmarks can become unwieldy. That's where grouping comes in. It's not just about tidiness, it's about making your report more intuitive and easier to manage for both developers and users.

The Key Advantages:

• Improved Report Usability: For the people viewing your report, grouped bookmarks create a structured navigation experience. Instead of a flat list, they get categories they can expand or collapse, like "Sales Performance," "Marketing Funnels," or "Regional Breakdowns." This feels much more like browsing a well-organized website.
• Simplified Development and Maintenance: As the report builder, grouping helps you keep track of your work. It's much easier to find, update, or troubleshoot a specific bookmark when it's neatly filed under a recognizable group name. Need to update all your Q1 sales bookmarks? Now they're all in one place.
• Logical Storytelling: Grouping is excellent for creating a guided narrative. You can create a group named "Annual Report Walkthrough" with bookmarks like "1. Executive Summary," "2. Q1 Performance," "3. Regional Deep Dive," guiding users step-by-step through the data story you want to tell.
• Cleaner Presentation Mode: When you present your report, the bookmarks bar is a key navigation tool. Grouped bookmarks provide a high-level overview, letting you smoothly jump between entire sections of your analysis without showing a distracting, disorganized list.

Step-by-Step Guide: How to Group Your Bookmarks

Creating bookmark groups is a straightforward process. Let's walk through it with a practical example where we want to group sales bookmarks by quarter.

Step 1: Create the Individual Bookmarks

First, you need the bookmarks you wish to group. If you already have some, you can skip to the next step. If not, here's how to create them:

1. Navigate to the report page you want to capture.
2. Apply the necessary filters and slicers. For our example, let's say you filter your sales report to show data for "Q1 2024."
3. Go to the View tab in the Power BI ribbon and check the box for Bookmarks. This will open the Bookmarks pane on the right.
4. In the Bookmarks pane, click Add. A new bookmark will appear with a generic name like "Bookmark 1."
5. Double-click the new bookmark to rename it. A descriptive name is crucial, so we'll call this one Q1 Sales 2024.
6. Repeat this process for other states. Create new bookmarks called Q2 Sales 2024, Q3 Sales 2024, and Q4 Sales 2024.

At this point, you'll have four individual bookmarks listed in the pane.

Step 2: Select the Bookmarks You Want to Group

Next, you need to select all the bookmarks that belong together. You can do this by holding down the Ctrl key on your keyboard and clicking on each bookmark you want to include in the group. In our case, click Q1 Sales 2024, Q2 Sales 2024, Q3 Sales 2024, and Q4 Sales 2024.

Step 3: Create the Group

With all relevant bookmarks selected, hover your mouse over one of the highlighted bookmarks. You'll see three dots (...) for more options appear.

1. Click the ... icon.
2. From the dropdown menu that appears, select Group.

Immediately, Power BI will create a new group containing your selected bookmarks and give it a default name like "Group 1."

Step 4: Rename Your New Group

Default names like "Group 1" aren't helpful. To keep things clear, give your group a meaningful name.

1. Double-click the name "Group 1."
2. Rename it something descriptive, like Quarterly Sales 2024.

That's it! You now have a collapsed group in your Bookmarks pane. You can click the small arrow next to its name to expand it and see the individual bookmarks inside. Your once-cluttered pane is now neat and organized.

Practical Use Cases for Bookmark Groups

Now that you know how to group bookmarks, here are a few ideas to show just how powerful this feature can be in real-world reports.

Use Case 1: Financial Reporting by Time Period

Financial reports often require views sliced by different timeframes. Instead of creating different pages for each view, use bookmark groups.

• Group: "P&L Statements"
• Group: "Balance Sheet Views"

This structure allows stakeholders to easily find the specific financial snapshot they need without getting lost.

Use Case 2: Product Performance Analysis

Imagine you run an e-commerce business and want to analyze different aspects of your product catalog.

• Group: "Product Category Analysis"
• Group: "Inventory Levels"

Here, a product manager can quickly toggle between high-level category views and more granular operational insights.

Use Case 3: Customer Demographic Segmentation

If you're analyzing your customer base, you might have different segments to show. Grouping bookmarks can make this analysis much more fluid.

• Group: "Customer Segmentation"

This is especially effective when combined with buttons that show and hide visuals, creating a highly interactive dashboard on a single page.

Pro Tips for Managing Your Bookmark Groups

Once you start using groups regularly, a few best practices will make your life even easier.

Tip 1: Use a Clear Naming Convention

Be consistent and descriptive with your naming. "Q1," "Q2," "Q3" is good, but "Sales Q1 2024," "Pipeline Q1 2024" is even better. Clear names for both bookmarks and groups make everything instantly understandable.

Tip 2: Adding and Removing Bookmarks from a Group

You're not locked into a group once you create it. To add a new bookmark to an existing group, simply drag and drop it into the group. To remove one, just drag and drop it outside of the group folder.

Tip 3: Updating Bookmarks Within a Group

If you need to change the state of a specific bookmark, you don't need to ungroup anything. Simply click the bookmark to activate its state, make your changes on the report page (e.g., change a filter), then go to the Bookmarks pane, click the "..." next to that bookmark, and select Update.

Final Thoughts

Grouping bookmarks in Power BI is a small step in the development process that delivers a huge payoff in report organization and user experience. It turns a potentially chaotic list of views into a structured, intuitive dashboard navigation that helps everyone find the insights they need more quickly.

While mastering features like bookmarks in Power BI is powerful for creating structured reports, we believe getting answers from your data should be even simpler from the get-go. At Graphed , we think differently about reporting. Instead of spending hours clicking, filtering, and organizing your dashboards manually, you can just connect your data sources — like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce — and an AI data analyst will build what you need in seconds based on your questions.