How To: Implement Conditional Navigation in Power BI

The pagination options in Power BI are a great way to break your Power BI reports down into manageable bites. Adding more pages can give a designer more real estate to work with and more ways to break down data. On the flip side, too many pages makes the Pages pane look cluttered and prevent the user from finding what they want. Dynamically driving users to each page of the Power BI report through conditional navigation is a good way to make sure that your reports are user friendly.

Best Practice: Create the dynamic navigation when development is done to avoid having to redo your navigational table.

Create Your Navigation Table

The first step in implementing conditional navigation is create a table in your data model to represent the pages in your report.

1. Go to the Home tab of your Power BI report.
2. Select “Enter Data”
3. Rename the table to “Navigation” or something similar.
4. Rename the column from Column1 to “Pagination” or something similar.
5. Add a row for every page in your report, make sure that the name you enter in each row matches the pages of your report.
6. Click on “Load”.

Add the Dropdown to the Power BI Report

The next step in adding conditional navigation to your Power BI report is to add a control onto the page that allows users to select where they want to go.

1. Add a slicer visualization to the report.
2. Drag your “Pagination” column into the Field input for the new slicer.
3. Go to the slicer and click the dropdown icon to the right of the title, select dropdown from the menu that appears.

Note: Make sure that the dropdown is single select.

Create a Button

Now, the report has a dropdown menu representing each page in the report that the user can click on to go to a page. We just need to make it work:

1. Add either an image, button or shape to the form.
   1. Image: Use an image that says “Go!” or “Submit” or something that indicates to the user that it will take them to the page they want.
   2. Button: A blank button is the best approach to use here, just add an outline and some text.
   3. Shape: Either a circle or a square would be a good indicator here.
2. In the visualizations menu, find the Action dropdown and turn it on.
3. Change the “Type” field to “Page Navigation”
4. Click on the “fx” button next to the destination field.
5. In the modal that appears, change the “Based on field” field to the column in your Navigation table that represents your pages.