Drill through in Power BI lets users right-click a data point on one report page and navigate to a detail page that’s automatically filtered to that selection. You set it up by creating a destination page, dragging a field into the Drill through well in the Visualizations pane, and building the detail visuals on that page. The entire process takes just a few minutes once you understand how the pieces connect.
How Drill Through Works
Think of drill through as a focused shortcut. You have a summary page showing total sales by product category, and you want users to click on “Electronics” and land on a page showing every individual transaction, margin breakdown, or regional split for Electronics only. The summary page is the source. The detail page is the target. Power BI passes the selected value as a filter so the target page displays only the relevant slice of data.
This is different from drilling down, which expands a hierarchy within a single visual (year to quarter to month, for example). Drill through navigates between pages.
Create the Target Page
Start by adding a new page in Power BI Desktop. This page will hold the detailed visuals your users land on after they drill through. Name it something descriptive, like “Product Detail” or “Customer Breakdown,” so it’s easy to identify later.
Build whatever visuals make sense for the detail view: tables, charts, KPI cards, or any combination. These visuals should reference the same data model as your summary page. Don’t worry about filtering them manually. Power BI will handle that once you configure the drill through field.
Add a Field to the Drill Through Well
With your target page selected, look at the Visualizations pane on the right side of the screen. Near the bottom, you’ll see a section labeled “Drill through.” Drag the field you want to filter by into this well. If your summary page shows data by product category, drag the Product Category field here.
The moment you drop a field into the Drill through well, two things happen. First, Power BI automatically adds a back button to the top-left corner of the target page so users can return to where they came from. Second, every page in your report that contains that field in a visual now supports right-click drill through to this target page.
You can add multiple fields to the Drill through well if you need the target page to accept different filter contexts. For instance, adding both Product Category and Region means users can drill through from either dimension.
Keep All Filters vs. Specific Fields
By default, when a user drills through, Power BI passes only the value from the field you placed in the Drill through well. But there’s a toggle at the top of the Drill through section called “Keep all filters.” When you turn this on, every filter that’s active on the source page, including slicer selections and visual-level filters, carries over to the target page.
This matters when your source page has slicers. If a user has filtered the summary page to show only Q3 2024 data and then drills through on “Electronics,” turning on Keep all filters ensures the detail page shows Electronics for Q3 2024 specifically, not Electronics for all time. Leave it off if you want the target page to show the full picture for whatever data point the user clicked.
Test the Right-Click Experience
Switch to your summary page and enter the report’s reading view (or use Ctrl+click in the editing view). Right-click on a data point in any visual that contains the drill through field. You should see a “Drill through” option in the context menu, with your target page listed as a destination. Click it, and Power BI navigates to the target page with the filter applied.
If the Drill through option appears grayed out, it usually means the visual you right-clicked doesn’t contain the field you placed in the Drill through well, or the data point doesn’t map to a single value in that field. A bar chart showing Product Category will work. A card showing total revenue with no category dimension won’t, because Power BI has no specific value to pass.
Add a Drill Through Button
Right-clicking works, but many users don’t discover it on their own. A visible button makes the interaction obvious. To add one, go to the Insert tab and place a button on your source page. In the Visualizations pane, expand the button’s Action settings and set the type to “Drill through.” Then select your target page from the destination dropdown.
The button is context-aware. It activates only when the user has selected a data point that matches the drill through field on the target page. If nothing is selected, the button stays disabled. You can use conditional formatting to control whether the button is visible or hidden based on the current filter context, which keeps the page clean when no selection has been made.
Add a clear label to the button, something like “View Details” or “See Full Breakdown,” along with a tooltip explaining what will happen when the user clicks. This small step makes your report more intuitive, especially for people who aren’t familiar with Power BI navigation.
Cross-Report Drill Through
Drill through isn’t limited to pages within the same report. Power BI also supports cross-report drill through, where a user clicks a data point in one report and lands on a detail page in a completely different report file. Both reports need to be published to the same Power BI workspace, and the target report must have a drill through page configured with a matching field name and data type.
To enable this, open File, then Options and settings, then Options in Power BI Desktop. Under the Current file section, look for the Report settings page and enable “Allow visuals in this report to use drill-through targets from other reports.” The target report also needs this setting enabled. Once both reports are published to the service, right-clicking a data point in the source report will show drill through destinations from the target report alongside any same-report targets.
Cross-report drill through requires that both reports share a common field name and compatible data type. If your source report uses “ProductCategory” and the target uses “Product_Category,” Power BI won’t match them. Keep your naming consistent across datasets to avoid this.
Controlling Page Visibility
Most drill through target pages aren’t meant to be browsed to directly. They only make sense when filtered by a specific value. To prevent users from accidentally navigating to an unfiltered detail page, right-click the page tab and select “Hide page.” Hidden pages still work as drill through targets. They just don’t appear in the page navigation tabs, so users only reach them through the intended path.
Practical Tips for Better Drill Through Pages
Include the filtered value prominently on the target page. Add a card visual or text box that displays the drill through field so users immediately see what they’re looking at. If someone drills through to “Electronics,” the word “Electronics” should be visible at the top of the page without hunting for it.
Keep the back button. Power BI adds one automatically, but it’s easy to accidentally delete it while designing the page. If you lose it, insert a new button, set its action type to “Back,” and place it in a consistent location. Users need a clear way to return to the summary page.
Limit the number of drill through fields per page. While you can stack multiple fields in the Drill through well, each additional field creates a more complex filter context that can confuse users. If you need detail pages for different dimensions, consider creating separate target pages, one for product detail, another for customer detail, rather than overloading a single page.