Recently I created Power BI report contain multiple pages. At the 1st page, there is summary page contain one big table visual. Then I create buttons at some of the column header to navigate to the other page relate to column header under that specific button.
Question is can I fix this button position ? because if someone change the width of the column, (not to mentioned, remove the field) the button will possibly in the wrong position already because it does not attached to the column.
I don’t believe there’s a way to do this in Power BI at the moment so that it will dynamically size based on a change to the column size.
I think your only option here is to set it up and make sure the user doesn’t change anything. If things are clearly labelled then I’m sure there is a good chance it want be changed by a consumer of the report.
I have a possible alternative for you using drillthrough functionality.
I had previously created a drillthrough page for a revenue analysis report such that for any individual customer, the user can right-click and drillthrough to a Customer Profile page. The customers are individual data values, either in a visual like a tree map or in a table cell.
Your question prompted me to see if drillthrough works on column headers using the specific value that the column represents. And it worked! Not only can you right-click the column header, but also any individual cell in that column, and the drillthrough still worked.
A brief summary of what I did as a demo, using a table of ticket counts by fiscal year and month with a drillthrough on month:
Create a new page in the report and drag the data column you want to filter on into the Drillthrough field well. My Month field came from the standard Dates dimension table.
Add a table or other visual to the new page to show Month-related statistics. I simply copied the table from the original report page to the new page to test it.
Go to the original page and right-click on the column header in the table for your data value (e.g. September in my test). You should see the Drillthrough context menu option with your new page listed. Clicking the new page name will bring you to the new page with the data filtered for the column header value.
Now go back to the original page and right-click on an individual cell to drillthrough. You should jump to the new page with both the column and the row filter applied (that is cool - dynamic context-sensitive drillthrough filtering).
This will address one of your main issues, which is attaching the button to the column. Using drillthrough, the action is tied to the value itself, so if the data appears in the table it can be used to drillthrough, and if it doesn’t appear there is no residual button to deal with. Resizing the columns has no effect.
You still have to confirm that this will work for the context of your main summary table, but functionally it works. Then of course there is user training, but drillthrough is OOTB so once users know how to use it for one report, they will know for every report that uses it.
This is a really clever solution, that I’ve bookmarked for future use.
To your point about training users on drillthrough, check out this approach below on how to put instructional gifs into the visual header tooltip:
I’m actually putting this into one of my reports this week, since despite training, I still get this question from users - “how do I drill down into the detail page again?”
This is a really clever solution, that I’ve bookmarked for future use.