What is Drill Through in Power BI?

Ever built a Power BI dashboard, stood back to admire your work, and realized it’s a bit… much? Jamming every possible chart onto a single page can overwhelm your audience and hide the very insights you’re trying to reveal. This is where Power BI’s drill through feature comes in, allowing you to create clean, high-level summaries that connect to detailed, focused reports with a single click. This article will show you exactly what drill through is, how it differs from drill down, and provide a step-by-step guide to set it up in your own reports.

What Exactly is Drill Through in Power BI?

Think of your main dashboard as the cover of a book - it gives you a great overview of the main topics. Drill through is like being able to instantly jump to the exact page in a chapter that discusses a specific character or event you’re interested in. Instead of forcing users to manually flip through pages or apply complex filters, you give them a direct path to the details.

Technically, drill through is a feature that allows users to navigate from a data point in one report page (the “source”) to another, more detailed page (the “target” or “destination”). When they use the drill through action, the context from the source report - the specific data point they selected - is carried over to the target page, which is then automatically filtered.

For example, a user looking at a high-level summary of sales by country could right-click on "Canada" and drill through to a separate page that shows a detailed breakdown of Canadian sales by product category, sales representative, and customer.

Key Benefits of Using Drill Through

Adding drill through functionality into your reports isn’t just a fancy trick, it offers practical benefits that make your dashboards far more powerful and user-friendly.

• Creates Cleaner Dashboards: It allows you to design minimalist, easy-to-read summary pages because you know the nitty-gritty details are just a click away. This prevents cognitive overload and helps users focus on the most important KPIs first.
• Provides Deeper Context: Instead of just seeing what is happening in a summary chart, users can seamlessly explore why it is happening. A spike in sales for a particular region can be investigated immediately by drilling through to see the underlying transactions or campaign data.
• Improves User Experience: It turns a static report into an interactive, exploratory tool. Users feel empowered because they can self-serve their own follow-up questions without needing to ask an analyst to build a new report. It’s intuitive and encourages data exploration.
• Reduces Redundancy: Instead of building ten different versions of a detailed report for ten different regions, you build a single detail "template" and use drill through to apply the context for each region dynamically.

Drill Through vs. Drill Down: What's the Difference?

Many new Power BI users confuse "drill through" with "drill down." While both features allow you to explore data at a more granular level, they work in fundamentally different ways. Understanding this distinction is crucial for building effective reports.

Drill down lets you navigate up and down within a visual that contains a hierarchy. For example, if you have a date hierarchy (Year > Quarter > Month > Day), you can start at the Year level and "drill down" to see the data by Quarter, then Month - all within the same chart. The visual itself changes to show the next level of detail.

Drill through, on the other hand, involves navigating from one report page to another. It's an action that takes you entirely out of the current view and into a separate, pre-configured detail page, carrying the filter context with it.

Here's a simple breakdown:

• What changes?
• How is it structured?
• Example Use Case:

Step-by-Step: How to Set Up Drill Through in Power BI

Now for the practical part. Setting up a drill through is a straightforward process that involves configuring your destination page to accept a filter from your source page. Let's walk through it with a common business scenario: analyzing product sales.

Imagine we have two pages:

1. Sales Overview (Source Page): A summary page with a chart showing total sales by Product Category.
2. Product Details (Target Page): A detailed page we want to use to show sales metrics for a single, selected product category.

Step 1: Configure Your Target Page

The first step is to tell Power BI that your "Product Details" page is a drill-through destination.

1. Navigate to your target page (in our case, "Product Details"). This page should already contain the detailed visuals you want to see, such as sales by sub-category, a list of top-selling products, and a sales trend line.
2. With no visuals selected on the page, click on the page background to bring up the Page formatting options in the Visualizations pane.
3. Find the Drill through section at the bottom of the pane.
4. From your Fields pane, find the field that will be used to filter this page. In our example, we want users to drill through from a specific product category, so we will drag the Product Category field into the box labelled "Add drill-through fields here."

As soon as you add the field, two things happen:

• Power BI automatically adds a "Back" button icon to the top left of your report page. This button, when clicked (or Ctrl+clicked in Power BI Desktop), will take the user back to the previous page they were on.
• The "Keep all filters" toggle appears. A simple on/off switch, on for most users’ needs, will preserve any filtering or slicing applied besides the chosen drill through fields from the previous page to your destination. We’ll discuss it further a little bit ahead.

That's it for the destination page. It is now ready to receive a user who is "drilling through" with a Product Category context.

Step 2: Use the Drill Through Feature from your Source Page

Now, let's see how a user would trigger this action from the "Sales Overview" page.

1. Navigate to your source page ("Sales Overview").
2. Find a visual that uses the same field you designated as the drill-through field - in this case, your chart shows sales by Product Category.
3. Right-click on one of the data points in that visual. For example, right-click on the bar or segment representing "Electronics."
4. In the context menu that appears, you will now see an option labelled Drill through. Hovering over it will reveal the name of your target page: "Product Details."
5. Click on "Product Details."

You’ll be instantly transported to the Product Details page, and you will notice that every visual on that page is now filtered to show data for the "Electronics" category only. The drill-through has successfully passed the context ("Electronics") from one page to another.

Tips and Best Practices for Drill Through

Once you’ve mastered the basics, you can enhance the drill-through experience with a few additional tricks.

Use the "Keep All Filters" Toggle for Complete Context

In the drill-through setup pane on your target page, you'll see a toggle for Keep all filters. What does this do?

If this is switched OFF, only the filter from the specific Product Category you right-clicked will be passed to the target page.

If it's switched ON, Power BI will pass the Product Category filter plus any other active filters on the source page. For example, if a user had previously filtered the Sales Overview page for the year "2023" and then drilled through on "Electronics," the target page would be filtered for both "Year is 2023" AND "Category is Electronics." This is incredibly useful for maintaining context during a detailed analysis.

Create a Drill Through Button for Better User Experience

The right-click method is functional but not always obvious to new users. You can make the drill-through pathway much clearer by creating an on-page button.

1. On your source page, go to the Insert tab and add a Button (a blank one works well).
2. With the button selected, go to the Format pane and expand the Action section.
3. Turn the Action On, set the Type to "Drill through," and select your "Product Details" page as the Destination.
4. Here's the key: by default, this button will be disabled. It only becomes active when a user selects a single value in a visual that contains your drill-through field (Product Category).
5. Customize the button text for different states. Under the Style settings in the Format pane, you can set the button text for its Default state to something like "View Details" and set the text for its Disabled state to "Select a Product Category to see details." This provides a direct call-to-action for your users.

Leverage Cross-Report Drill Through

Did you know you can drill through between different reports, not just pages in the same file? As long as reports are published to the same Power BI workspace online and use the same data model, you can set up cross-report drill-through. On the target page's drill-through settings, simply turn on the "Cross-report" toggle. This enables you to build a cohesive ecosystem of specialized reports - like a main corporate dashboard that can drill through to separate, highly detailed reports for Sales, Marketing, and Operations.

Final Thoughts

Drill through is one of the most practical features in a Power BI developer's toolbox. It transforms a one-dimensional dashboard into an interactive analytical journey, allowing users to move from "what" to "why" seamlessly. By layering information across source and target pages, you can provide incredible depth without sacrificing the clarity of your high-level summaries.

While mastering Power BI's features like drill through can feel empowering, the initial setup - building the separate pages, configuring the fields manually, adding buttons, and publishing - takes time. With Graphed, we aim to deliver that same "oh, now I see the full picture" moment instantly. You connect your data and can explore details just by asking questions. Instead of pre-building a drill through path for product details, you could simply interrogate your dashboard with a question like "show me the top products for UK sales this quarter and visualize it as a table." We handle the background work to give you the answer, letting you focus on the insights, not the setup.