Easy As Insights — Part 3: Taming Power BI Maintenance — Bookmarks Naming Conventions
In this series of “Easy As Insights” articles I will cover some of the best practices for managing and maintaining Power BI insights reports, especially if you are in the corporate world where your team is developing insights for many departments and users across the organization.
In Part 1 of this series I explained how a team can make Power BI reports maintenance easy by standardizing insight report templates.
In Part 2 of this series I explained how a team can make Power BI reports maintenance easy by standardizing insight names and ordering in the Selection Pane.
In this article I will explain how a team can make Power BI reports maintenance easy by following standard naming conventions for Bookmarks especially when using bookmarks for visual toggling.
Bookmark Naming Convention
One of the advanced feature of Power BI is ability to bookmark a given state of a insights report page.
You can create really good user experience by using bookmark feature to toggle data/visuals displayed in a page.
In the sample screen a user can click on any of the KPIs in the left hand side bottom group to toggle the chart visual to respective KPI.
This is achieved by using bookmarks and visuals show/hide features.
To use such features it is important to follow the below best practices:
- As explained in Part 2 of this article, visual naming convention and ordering in Selection Pane.
- A proper naming convention for Bookmarks.
Visual names and order in a page is specific to that particular page. On the other hand Bookmarks are global to the whole report (.pbix file). Therefore it is more important to follow a proper naming convention for Bookmarks.
My recommended best practice for Bookmark name is a combination of Report ID and Bookmarking State of the page.
Side Note: Use Report ID
As explained in Part 1 of this series, it is important to have a Report ID for each page/tab in a Power BI report file. The tab/page in the report should use the Report ID as the prefix of the tab/page name. For Example if there is a sales report and the Report ID SLS-001, then the tab/page should be named “SLS-001 Sales”.
Naming a tab/page with Report ID as prefix will be very useful when the tab/page is hidden and users are provided with a navigation page to get to the insight report. I will explain this in Part 5of this series.
Getting Back To Bookmark Naming Convention
As stated earlier, my recommended best practice for Bookmark name is a combination of Report ID and Bookmarking State of the page.
Since bookmark names are global to the whole report by using the Report ID it will enable us to easily identify which tab the Bookmark belongs to — since the tab/page name will also use Report ID as the prefix.
In the sample screen the default state of RPT-002 Sales YTD page is bookmarked and named as “RPT-002_Default”. Just from the name I can know that this is the bookmark for the default state of tab/page RPT-002.
Combining Bookmark Name And Selection Pane Visual Name and Ordering
To achieve the chart toggle effect when clicked on a KPI, we need to use Bookmark and visual show/hide (in Selection Pane).
There are total of six (06) charts in this page. But only two (02) are visible in default state of the page and others are hidden.
As you can see it is very easy to identify which charts should be displayed and which charts should be hidden at the default state bookmark because we used proper naming conventions for visuals and ordered them in a easy to identify groups.
As you can see the sample screen has many bookmarks to enable the various KPI chart toggling for each page. When there are such complex Power BI reports, following proper visual naming and ordering in Selectin Pane, using Report ID in tab/page name and using Report ID as prefix in Bookmarks all play a major role in easy maintenance of such complex reports.
Easy As Insights Series of Articles
Easy As Insights — Part 1: Taming Power BI Maintenance — Insights Template
Easy As Insights — Part 2: Taming Power BI Maintenance — Visuals Naming Conventions
Easy As Insights — Part 3: Taming Power BI Maintenance — Bookmarks Naming Conventions
Easy As Insights — Part 5: Improving Power BI User Experience — Using Navigation Pages
