One of the most useful features that has been included in Power BI over the last couple of years is the use of Parameter fields to allow users to switch between fields in a visual on-the-fly. Unfortunately, like a lot of new Power BI features, it feels as though the last 10% of functionality was put in the too-hard basket and abandoned. That bit of functionality I’m referring to, is the ability to keep the drill level on the visual when switching fields.
Here’s a little GIF that shows what I’m referring to:
This isn’t so bad if there’s only 1 visual on the screen. The user can easily click the bident button in the top right corner and drill back to the desired view. If there are several visuals on the page, this starts to become a bigger problem and the user has to manually click through on each visual individually. It’s also not very intuitive to the average user.
There is a small hack that can work around this however. As long as the parameter field is not at the highest or lowest level of the hierarchy, Power BI will not reset the drill level.
I created a new blank column using the formula:
Blank = BLANK()I then added this to the top level of my hierarchy. Since I don’t want the user to see “Blank” on the report, I simply renamed the Blank to ” ” (single space, but without the quotes) on the visual:
The end result being a parameter field on a matrix visual that DOES remember the drill level:
That’s all there is to it. The PBIX file I used for this example can be downloaded from Github:
https://github.com/comm9200/Power-BI-Demos/blob/main/Maintain%20drill%20level%20when%20changing%20field%20parameters.pbix
