Enhancing Power BI Bookmarks

[alvinquwwata290]

Hello, community,

As we embark on this exciting initiative to enhance Power BI bookmarks, I’ve carefully reviewed and compiled the insightful feedback, comments, and suggestions shared in various discussions. These observations touch upon common use cases, challenges, and innovative ideas that can significantly improve bookmarks and their usability in Power BI.

I’ve organized this information into a comprehensive document, which captures key points and potential enhancements. If there’s anything I might have overlooked or if you have additional feedback, please feel free to contribute your thoughts. Your participation is invaluable, as it will guide the future development and help shape a more efficient and user-friendly Power BI experience.

Here’s a quick look at the compiled ideas and challenges:

Common Uses for Bookmarks:

1. Dynamic UI/UX Adjustments: Show/hide visuals, create navigation panels, or dynamically change layouts.
2. Filter Management: Save and apply pre-defined filter combinations, including reset filters to default views.
3. Custom Report Navigation: Navigate between sections or simulate a multi-page report experience within a single page.
4. Presentation Support: Highlight key data points and narrative storytelling.
5. Interactive Visualizations: Create modals or tooltips by toggling objects on and off.

Key Challenges Identified:

1. Maintenance Complexity: Difficulties in managing and updating bookmarks across large reports.
2. Clarity and Documentation: Lack of visual cues or descriptions to identify the purpose and impact of each bookmark.
3. Limited Flexibility:

• Inability to selectively update specific aspects of a bookmark.
• Lack of support for conditional logic or dynamic bookmarks based on user interactions.

1. Scalability:

• Challenges in duplicating bookmarks for new pages or across reports.
• High effort in managing bookmarks for complex use cases.

1. Interactivity Constraints:

• No ability to trigger bookmarks based on user interactions with visuals.
• Limited options for sharing and organizing bookmarks.

Proposed Enhancements:

1. Improved Maintenance:

• Introduce folders or tagging for better bookmark organization.
• Add visual previews and an editable description for each bookmark.

1. Dynamic Features:

• Enable conditional logic for bookmarks (e.g., dynamic changes based on slicer selections).
• Support for triggering bookmarks via interactions, like hovering or cross-filtering.

1. Enhanced Scalability:

• Allow copying bookmarks across pages and reports.
• Implement bulk editing and group management of bookmarks.

1. User-Focused Features:

• Share bookmarks with specific permissions (e.g., view-only or editable).
• Introduce personal bookmarks with customizable sorting and sharing options.

1. Expanded Interactivity:

• Support for combining multiple bookmarks into a single action.
• Provide seamless integration with advanced UI/UX patterns like sliding panels or multi-state visuals.

1. Developer-Centric Tools:

• Expose APIs for third-party visuals to interact with bookmarks.
• Incorporate version control and undo/redo functionality for accidental changes.

Your feedback and ideas are essential to this process. Please add any further suggestions or comments below, and don’t forget to vote on the ones you find most valuable. Together, we can build a more intuitive and powerful bookmarking experience in Power BI.

Thank you for being part of this journey!

[andy_clapham]

Thans for collating this, it's a shame it's a bit lost in the ideas forum, but I found it 🙂

My main comment is the last point:

• Incorportate version control and undo/redo functionality

For version control - the critical thing here for me is rather than having this incorporated directly in the UI, instead concentrate on making true version control possible.

- version control is more than simply going back to an old version (although of course simple undo in the UI is essential)

- the real power of version control is the ability to see differences and merge changes across versions.

- the standard way to enable this is to ensure there is an underlying representation as text that has had some though applied to make it possible to merge. Think code + git.

So can I ask that there is some collaboration with the bookmark changes along with the team that is looking at the report-definition equivalent of TMDL.

Currently the report serialization is incredibly granular and verbose, and is impossible to diff+merge.

My key improvements would be:

• One json file per bookmark
• ReportSection ID can be set by user and remains stable
• Visual containers ID can be set by user and remains stable
• A readable DSL grammar for expressions (), rather than a json serializatin of an AST.

If there's a place where this is being discussed in more detail, I'd love to contribute.

[andy_clapham]

/Sigh/ These forums don't format comments properly.

*** TL;DR: Improve JSON serialization for true VCS ***