Create buttons in Power BI reports
With buttons in Power BI, you can create reports that behave similar to apps, and create an environment where users can hover, click, and further interact with Power BI content. This article explains how to add buttons to reports in Power BI Desktop and in the Power BI service. When you share your reports in the Power BI service, buttons provide an app-like experience. The article Identify and use buttons in the Power BI service describes how report readers experience buttons in your reports.
Create buttons in reports
Create a button in Power BI Desktop
To create a button in Power BI Desktop, on the Insert ribbon, select Buttons and a drop-down menu appears, where you can select the button you want from a collection of options, as shown in the following image.
Create a button in the Power BI service
To create a button in the Power BI service, open the report in Editing view. Select Buttons in the top menu bar and a drop-down menu appears, where you can select the button you want from a collection of options, as shown in the following image.
Customize a button
Whether you create the button in Power BI Desktop or the Power BI service, the rest of the process is the same. When you select the button on the report canvas, the Format button pane shows you the many ways you can customize the button to fit your requirements. For example, you can add a custom image.
See Customize buttons in Power BI reports for more information.
Set button properties when idle, hovered over, or selected
Buttons in Power BI have three states: default (how they appear when not hovered over or selected), when hovered over, or when selected (often referred to as being clicked). Many of the cards in the Format button pane can be modified individually based on those three states, providing plenty of flexibility for customizing your buttons.
The following cards in the Format button pane let you adjust formatting or behavior of a button based on its three states:
- Button Text
- Icon
- Outline
- Fill
To select how the button should appear for each state, expand one of those cards and select the drop-down that appears at the top of the card. In the following image, you see the Icon card expanded, with the drop-down selected to show the three states.
Select the action for a button
You can select which action is taken when a user selects a button in Power BI. You can access the options for button actions from the Action card in the Format button pane.
Here are the options for button actions:
- Back returns the user to the previous page of the report. This is useful for drillthrough pages.
- Bookmark presents the report page that's associated with a bookmark that is defined for the current report. Learn more about bookmarks in Power BI.
- Drillthrough navigates the user to a drillthrough page filtered to their selection, without using bookmarks. Learn more about drillthrough buttons in reports.
- Page navigation navigates the user to a different page within the report, also without using bookmarks. See Create page navigation in this article for details.
- Q&A opens a Q&A Explorer window.
Certain buttons have a default action selected automatically. For example, the Q&A button type automatically selects Q&A as the default action. You can learn more about Q&A Explorer by checking out this blog post.
You can try or test the buttons you create for your report by using CTRL+CLICK on the button you want to use.
Create page navigation
With the Action type Page navigation, you can build an entire navigation experience without having to save or manage any bookmarks at all.
To set up a page navigation button, create a button with Page navigation as the action type, and select the Destination page.
You can build a custom navigation pane, and add the navigation buttons to it. You avoid having to edit and manage bookmarks if you want to change which pages to show in your navigation pane.
Additionally, you can conditionally format the tooltip as you can do with other button types.
Set the navigation destination conditionally
You can use conditional formatting to set the navigation destination, based on the output of a measure. For example, you may want to save space on your report canvas by having a single button to navigate to different pages based on the user’s selection.
To create the example shown above, start by creating a single-column table with the names of the navigation destinations:
Power BI uses exact string match to set the drillthrough destination, so double-check that the entered values exactly align with your drillthrough page names.
After you've created the table, add it to the page as a single-select slicer:
Then create a page navigation button and select the conditional formatting option for the destination:
Select the name of the column you created, in this case, Select a destination:
Now the button can navigate to different pages, depending on the user’s selection.
Shapes and images for navigation
Page navigation action is supported for shapes and images, not just buttons. Here’s an example using one of the built-in shapes:
Here’s an example using an image:
Buttons support fill images
Buttons support fill images. You can customize the look and feel of your button with fill images combined with the built-in button states: default, on hover, on press, and disabled (for drillthrough).
Set Fill to On, then create images for the different states.
Next steps
For more information about features that are similar or interact with buttons, take a look at the following articles: