Forum Discussion
Drill Through
I've read a lot and I've watched some videos, and I'm still confused about drill throughs. Can I just have one big table that I can use to drill thru to from many different visuals? And just use filters for the different things I want to drill thru to?
Yes, you can have one drill-through page that serves as a destination from many visuals across the report. On that page, drag the field you want to drill on (for example Customer or Product) into the Drill through bucket in the Visualizations pane. Any visual that uses that same field will then expose a Drill through option on right click, and your destination page will be automatically filtered to the value you came from. You can put as many fields in the Drill through bucket as you want, so a single page can support several drill-through entry points. Keep the page focused on the detail you want to expose so users see it filtered by whatever they clicked from.
If this helped, a thumbs up and accepting the solution would be appreciated.
Best regards,
Shai Karmani
6 Replies
Yes, you can have one drill-through page that serves as a destination from many visuals across the report. On that page, drag the field you want to drill on (for example Customer or Product) into the Drill through bucket in the Visualizations pane. Any visual that uses that same field will then expose a Drill through option on right click, and your destination page will be automatically filtered to the value you came from. You can put as many fields in the Drill through bucket as you want, so a single page can support several drill-through entry points. Keep the page focused on the detail you want to expose so users see it filtered by whatever they clicked from.
If this helped, a thumbs up and accepting the solution would be appreciated.
Best regards,
Shai KarmaniYes, you can use one big table fact table, but it does not change how drillthrough works in Power BI.
Drillthrough does not depend on whether you have one table or multiple tables. It depends on the fields you add to the Drillthrough filter well on the target page.
For example, if you have a sales table with Customer, Product, Region, and Sales, you can create a drillthrough page using fields like Customer, Region, or Product. When you click a specific value in a visual, such as Customer = Ali or Region = Kismaayo, Power BI will take you to a detailed page filtered for that specific selection.
You can also use filters (slicers), but they are not the same as drillthrough. Filters allow you to explore data on the same page by manually selecting values, while drillthrough lets you click a data point and navigate to a detailed page focused on that selection.
In summary, using one big table is fine and common in Power BI, but drillthrough is controlled by fields, not table design. Filters and drillthrough serve different purposes and do not replace each other.
Maybe you can help with this? I'm still having trouble. I have a number of jobs, and each has a few "phases," and a differnet person is responsible for each phase completed by the due date.
I'm trying to build a simple card that shows how many jobs/phases are overdue. But I want to be able to click and show the applicable row of the table but only the applicable columns.
Job number Phase 1 Due Phase 1 Completion Phase 1 Engineer Phase 2 Due Phase 2 Completion Phase 2 Engineer 1 2/10/26 2/9/26 John 5/5/26 Bob 2 5/10/26 Bill 5/30/26 Bob
(If I click on the overdue Phase 1 card, I just want to show the table with only the Phase 1 columns, and likewise if I click on the overdue Phase 2 card, Just show Phase 1 columns. This is simplified - there are lots of phases and dates. (thus why I wanted to just use One drill thru table with filters.)
You have a bad design because your table is “wide” with repeated phase columns Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3, etc.. This structure is not suitable for Power BI analysis because it creates duplication, makes calculations harder, and prevents proper drillthrough and filtering behavior. It also breaks scalability, since adding more phases means adding more columns and rewriting measures and visuals.
The correct design is to normalize the data into a “long format” instead of a wide format. This means each row should represent one job and one phase, rather than having multiple phase columns in a single row.
Correct design:
Job Number | Phase | Due Date | Completion Date | Engineer
Example:
1 | Phase 1 | 2/10/26 | 2/9/26 | John
1 | Phase 2 | 5/5/26 | (blank) | Bob
2 | Phase 1 | 5/10/26 | (blank) | Bill
2 | Phase 2 | 5/30/26 | (blank) | (blank)This design is better because:
- It allows easy filtering by Phase
- Drillthrough works naturally using the Phase field
- Measures like “overdue” become simple
- It scales easily (you can add Phase 3, Phase 4 without changing structure)
- It follows best practices for Power BI data modeling (star/normalized structure)
In short, your current design is bad for analytics, and the correct approach is to unpivot phases into rows so each phase becomes a record instead of a column.
Hi everyone , I have an issue with drill through. I created a dashboard about the analysis of car brands, on the main page I put their icons ( brand logo ) together in a row and when I click on any Icon, I want to go its page of analysis.
I have tried many ways but I don't successed ( Like creating an analysis page for each brand and enabling page navigation )
In short, I'd like to just make an anylysis page not one page for each brand.
Thank you in advance
