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Category: Power BI

Adding a Drillthrough Button in Power BI

Elena Drakulevska adds a button:

If you’ve been building Power BI reports, you probably know about drillthrough.

In short: drillthrough lets users move from a summary view to a detail page focused on one data point. For example, you can right-click on Austria in a sales chart and jump straight to a page showing visuals and metrics only about Austria.

Sounds powerful, right?

The catch: most users don’t even know it’s been implemented.

The other catch: those of us sad souls using Power BI Report Server don’t get drillthrough at all.

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Finding Rows with Errors in Power Query

Gilbert Quevauvilliers goes around looking for trouble:

In the past when there has been an error when loading data into the semantic model, there can be times when clicking on the View errors can either take a very long time to show those errors. Or in some cases it never shows you the error.

In this blog post I am going to show you an alternative way to quickly find the errors.

The column quality data preview option is absolutely worth keeping on at all times.

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Prereqs for using Power BI’s Analyze in Excel Capability

Nicky van Vroenhoven lays out the rules:

I think I now got this question 4 times in the last months, so I thought I’d write it down so I can reference it later, and point people to it

What are the requirements so (a group of) colleagues can start using Analyze in Excel?

Good question, let me break it down. 
In general, I think it’s also better to use Analyze in Excel than Export to Excel!
Reza Rad also wrote about why that’s important earlier.

Click through for the list of prerequisites and a few things to keep in mind.

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Tracking when Workspace Monitoring Throttles Power BI Queries

Chris Webb wants to know if Workspace Monitoring is throttling any Power BI queries in Microsoft Fabric:

A lot of new documentation was published recently around Fabric capacities, including documentation on how to size and govern capacities and how to troubleshoot problems with capacities. The latter has instructions on how to use the Capacity Metrics App to determine if your Power BI queries are being throttled; it mentions that you can also determine if queries have been throttled using Workspace Monitoring or Log Analytics but doesn’t go into details about how, something I will address in this post.

Read on to learn more.

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Conditional Formatting for Clarity in Power BI

Ben Richardson tells a story:

Consider a typical sales dashboard filled with charts, KPIs, and large tables.

Users often have to guess what is important, read legends, or ask questions like “What does this mean?” or “Which numbers require attention?”

Many dashboards display data but do not guide users to key insights effectively.

Read on for a few different possibilities based around conditional formatting.

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Organizational Themes in Power BI

Boniface Muchendu takes a peek at a fairly new feature:

Keeping your Power BI reports consistent, clean, and on-brand just got a lot easier. With the new Organizational Themes feature released in June 2025, Power BI now allows organizations to centrally manage and distribute custom report themes across all users. No more manual theme imports or scattered design standards.

Read on to see how it works, and hopefully your organization does not have terrible standards.

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Using Sankey Diagrams in Power BI

Ben Richardson creates a visual:

Ever wished you could see exactly how customers move through your sales funnel, or how costs flow across your business?

A Sankey Diagram makes those flows visible, showing not just totals but how values split and connect between categories.

In Power BI, the Sankey Diagram is available as a custom visual from AppSource, designed to reveal relationships and flow patterns.

There are specific times and places for Sankey charts. It requires having a natural flow in your data—that is, you need different states of data, those states should typically only “move” in one direction, you have paths to get from one state to another, and there is enough variety in pathing that not all of the data is going to the same location. The more of these rules you violate, the less useful a Sankey diagram is.

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Adding Carousel Buttons in Power BI

Ben Richardson builds a carousel:

If you’ve ever tried to cram too many charts onto one report page, you know what happens.

The page gets cluttered, users don’t know where to look, and the story you’re trying to tell gets lost.

Carousel buttons fix that problem.

Instead of stacking visuals side by side:

You place them in the same spot and let people flip through them like slides.

It feels cleaner, takes up less space, and keeps the audience focused.

Click through to see how it works. Note that carousels can be quite useful, but they also go against one of the tenets of dashboard design: glanceability. If I need to click, drag, scroll, or otherwise manipulate the dashboard before I can see the information I need to act, it’s not glanceable—I cannot gather relevant information at a glance and act upon it.

In other words, if I’m giving somebody an interactive Power BI report with the intent that the person will dig into results, then a carousel can be quite reasonable. But if I’m creating a dashboard that should be up most of the time and available for people to see, carousels aren’t a great call.

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Finding Power BI Operations from the Capacity Metrics App

Chris Webb notes something that has come out recently:

It’s the week of Fabcon Europe and you’re about to be overwhelmed with new Fabric feature announcements. However there is a new blink-and-you’ll-miss-it feature that appeared in the latest version of the Fabric Capacity Metrics App (released on 11th September 2025, version 47) that won’t get any fanfare but which I think is incredibly useful – it allows you to link the Power BI operations (such as queries or refreshes) you see in the Capacity Metrics App back to Workspace Monitoring, Log Analytics or Profiler so you can get details such as the query text.

Click through to see how it works.

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Modifying Power BI Page Visibility and Active Status via Semantic Link Labs

Meagan Longoria hides (or shows) a page:

Setting page visibility and the active page are often overlooked last steps when publishing a Power BI report. It’s easy to forget the active page since it’s just set to whatever page was open when you last saved the report. But we don’t have to settle for manually checking these things before we deploy to a new workspace (e.g., from dev to prod). If our report is in PBIR format, we can run Fabric notebooks to do this for us.

Click through for a notebook and an explanation.

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