Bookmarks, Buttons, and the Selection Pane: Building Interactive Power BI Reports

Three features show up together in almost every polished Power BI report you've ever used — a tab-like row of buttons that swap out an entire view, a "reset" button that snaps filters back to default, a toggle that shows one chart or another in the same spot. None of that is one feature. It's bookmarks, buttons, and the Selection pane working together, and PL-300 scenario questions like to isolate exactly which one is doing the work in a given example.

Bookmarks: saving a snapshot of report state

A bookmark captures the current state of a page — which filters and slicers are applied, which visuals are visible or hidden, their sort order, even the current drill level. Create one from the View tab's Bookmarks pane: set up the page the way you want it, click Add, and Power BI stores that snapshot. Click the bookmark later and the page snaps back to exactly that state.

Two checkboxes in the bookmark's options control exactly how much state it restores:

• Data — captures filters, slicers, and sort order.
• Display — captures which visuals are shown or hidden, and their size/position.

Turn off Data on a bookmark and it will toggle visibility without touching whatever filters are currently applied — which is exactly how you build a bookmark that shows "Chart A" instead of "Chart B" in the same spot without resetting the user's slicer selections. This is the single most common point of confusion in exam scenarios: a bookmark that also resets a slicer unexpectedly almost always has Data checked when the question intends only a display toggle.

The Selection pane: what a bookmark can actually hide

The Selection pane (also under the View tab) lists every object on the page — every visual, shape, button, and text box — and lets you toggle each one's visibility independently of whatever filters are applied. This matters because a bookmark's "Display" capture is really just a snapshot of the Selection pane's visibility toggles at the moment you clicked Add.

That dependency runs in both directions on the exam: a question might describe two visuals stacked in the same location, ask how to show only one at a time without duplicating the page, and the answer is "give each one a bookmark with Display captured, after using the Selection pane to toggle which is visible for each snapshot." It's also how you build layered visuals on purpose — a chart and a matrix occupying the same canvas space, swapped by bookmark instead of by navigating to a different page.

Buttons: giving a bookmark something to click

A bookmark by itself just sits in the Bookmarks pane — useful for you while building, but not something a report viewer can act on directly unless you expose the pane. Buttons close that gap. Insert a button (Insert → Buttons), then set its Action type to Bookmark and pick the bookmark it should trigger. Now a viewer clicks a labeled button instead of hunting through a pane.

Buttons support other action types worth knowing for PL-300:

• Page navigation — jumps to a different report page, no bookmark involved.
• Back — returns to the previously viewed state (this is the same action Power BI auto-adds to drillthrough pages).
• Web URL / Q&A — less common on the exam, but listed among the action types.
• Bookmark — triggers a saved bookmark, the combination this article is about.

A row of buttons each wired to its own bookmark is how most "tab" style navigation in Power BI reports is actually built — it looks like a navigation menu, but structurally it's just buttons triggering display-only bookmarks that show/hide different sets of visuals on one page.

Bookmark groups: multiple toggles that don't fight each other

A single bookmark captures the visibility of every object on the page by default, which becomes a problem the moment you want two independent toggles on the same page — say, a chart-type switcher in one corner and a filter-reset button in another. If both toggles are plain bookmarks, clicking one can undo the other's effect, because each bookmark's snapshot includes the whole page's state.

Bookmark groups solve this. Select the bookmarks that belong to one logical toggle (e.g., "Bar chart" and "Line chart"), right-click, and Group. Bookmarks inside a group only affect the elements relevant to that group when you check the group's own Data/Display settings relative to the objects selected at the time you created each bookmark in that group — in practice, build each group from bookmarks that were created while only that group's relevant visuals were selected, so switching between them doesn't touch an unrelated reset button elsewhere on the page. A PL-300 scenario describing "a chart-type toggle that also broke an unrelated filter button" is almost always pointing at missing bookmark groups.

A worked example: build a reset button

This is a common enough pattern that it's worth walking through end to end:

1. Build a page with a few slicers and a couple of visuals, filtered to look however you'd like a viewer's starting point to be.
2. Open the Bookmarks pane and click Add. Rename it "Default view."
3. Insert a button, set its text to "Reset filters," and set Action → Type to Bookmark, pointing at "Default view."
4. Apply different slicer selections to confirm the page actually changes, then click your new button. The slicers should snap back to the state you captured in step 2.

If the button doesn't reset the slicers, the most likely cause is that Data wasn't checked when the bookmark was created — go back into the bookmark's options (the "..." next to it in the Bookmarks pane) and confirm Data is checked, then click Update while the default filter state is active.

Where this shows up on the exam

• Data vs. Display checkboxes — recognizing which one explains a bookmark that resets filters it shouldn't, or fails to toggle visibility it should.
• Selection pane as the mechanism behind Display — understanding that hiding/showing objects via bookmarks is really just automating what the Selection pane already does manually.
• Button action types — Bookmark vs. Page navigation vs. Back, and picking the right one for a described navigation behavior.
• Bookmark groups — recognizing when two toggles are interfering with each other because they weren't grouped, versus a case where grouping isn't needed because only one toggle exists on the page.

Try it yourself

Build the reset-button example above, then add a second toggle — two visuals stacked in the same spot, swapped by two buttons — on the same page. Get both working independently before you group anything, break them on purpose by not grouping the bookmarks, then fix it with Group. Seeing the interference happen once makes the exam's "which setting explains this" questions far easier to answer from memory.