An alternate is to use disconnected tables and DAX to drive bookmark button behaviour. The advantage of this option is that you only have one bookmark button for each  bookmark and you have to configure its behaviour using DAX. You set up the DAX formulas just once and you can use the same set of bookmarks for other pages in the report.

To get started we open up a Power BI model and create a disconnected table called BookmarkFlag and create a new column called Value with five rows with values – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Now we need to create a few DAX measures to store the HEX properties of the colours we are going to use in the bookmark buttons. We will be using different colours for text and fill for the button text and fill. Hence we define four DAX measures as follows:

DefaultHoverTextColour = “#B3B3B3”

DefaultTextColour = “#E6E6E6”

SelectedColour = “#FFFFFF”

SelectedFillColour = “#FF6E15”

Next we go ahead and create a simple chart as below which shows the sales amount for the four hierarchies – SalesTerritoryGroup, SalesTerritoryCountry, SalesTerritoryRegion, Size

Next we create four bookmark buttons so that each one of them when clicked shows the sales for each hierarchy. They are also named appropriately as below

Next we need to define a series of DAX measures to drive the behaviour of the bookmark buttons. We define three measures for the first button as follows

Button 1 Fill Colour =
IF (
    SELECTEDVALUE ( ‘BookmarkFlags'[Value] ) = 1,
    [SelectedFillColour],
    [SelectedColour]
)

Button 1 Hover Text Colour =
IF (
    SELECTEDVALUE ( ‘BookmarkFlags'[Value] ) = 1,
    [SelectedColour],
    [DefaultHoverTextColour]
)

Button 1 Text Colour =
IF (
    SELECTEDVALUE ( ‘BookmarkFlags'[Value] ) = 1,
    [SelectedColour],
    [DefaultTextColour]
)

Use the above template to create 9 more measures, 3 for each button and replacing SELECTEDVALUE ( ‘BookmarkFlags'[Value] ) = 1 with 2, 3,4 respectively for each button. With 12 measures created we are now ready to apply them to the buttons

Select the first button and apply conditional formatting to the button text colour for the three states – default, on hover, on press. Also apply conditional formatting on the fill colour. The following video shows which measure to use and how to do it.

Use the same process and apply conditional formatting for Buttons 2, 3, 4 by using the appropriate measures. The four bookmark buttons should look like the below with the default text applied.

Open the bookmark pane and create four bookmarks and call them Bookmark 1, Bookmark 2, Bookmark 3, Bookmark 4.The final part involves updating the bookmarks by changing the value of the column Value from the BookmarkFlag table for each bookmark and updating the bar chart for each bookmark. We do this as below.

.

The final step is to assign each bookmark button its respective bookmark and then start browsing !

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It is no longer enough to just develop a data model and produce visuals and let the audience take it from there.

Reports need to be developed with the end user in mind while taking them on a journey so that the users have a better understanding of the data. This can be achieved by data storytelling techniques like strategic colouring, drill through, bookmarks and also providing enough visual cues so that the audience can drive the reports without much training.

In Power BI you can incorporate features such as bookmarks and drill through for story telling. The new Page Navigation option is even better as now you can quickly develop reports and let the audience drive them without much effort,

Watch the video for a demo on how it can be achieved. I have used two time series data and plotted it in a line chart along with average, max, min, rolling average and trend lines. That’s a lot of information on a line chart. But with effective storytelling you can introduce these elements one by one so that the end users have time to process all the information.

Link to interactive report: Data storytelling by page navigation in Power BI