2022 Week 02 | Power BI: Simplified Custom Page Navigation

Introduction

Welcome back to Power BI #WorkoutWednesday – week 2! We had incredible participation last week and are so excited to dive in this week with custom page navigation.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because we did a similar navigation challenge back in November 2021. In a fortunate turn of events, the Power BI team added an inbuilt custom page and bookmark navigation feature! The new navigation features remove the need for individual bookmarks and buttons.

In this week’s challenge, we are going to create a report using the new page navigator feature. Note that you must be on the Power BI November release (or later) to complete this challenge using the new feature. This challenge is all about design – use the data model provided and get creative with your solution!

Requirements

  1. Download the Power BI Desktop (.pbix) file containing the data model.
  2. Ensure you have the November 2021 Power BI Desktop release (or later) installed.
  3. Select a theme of your choosing. I used the Colorblind Safe theme.
  4. Create a report with multiple tabs.
    • The data provided includes data on food production and surplus by state, year, and cause.
    • It also includes data on proposed food waste solutions and their impact.
    • To set the scene of the problem, I used PowerPoint to create the icons for the first page of my report and used a simple text box on the second page. The last 2 pages of the report display the food waste data.
    • Note: if you have the new formatting pane turned on formatting a shape map is difficult. Turning it off will be helpful!
  5. Create your page navigator.
    • On the insert tab of the ribbon, insert buttons and select navigator, page navigator.
  6. Format your page navigator. Customize the shape, colors, and font size.
    • Choose font sizes of 12pt or larger for readability.
    • Notice that if you add additional tabs, the page navigator adjusts accordingly!
    • To test page navigation, hold the ctrl key while selecting the navigation button.
  7. Hide all tabs of your report except for the first tab. This will ensure that end-users see only the navigation options you provide.
  8.  Get creative with your design and share!

Dataset

This week’s data comes from ReFED’s Food Waste Monitor, which provides data on how much food is going uneaten in the United States, why it’s happening, and where it goes.  The data model is complete, all you need to do is complete the visual per the requirements above. 

This Power BI File is populated by 3 .csv files. To work with these files in Power Query, you can change the file path parameter to reflect the file path on your local machine. For example, if you store the files in a WoWFiles folder on your desktop, you will replace the file path parameter with: C:\Users\YourName\Desktop\WoWFiles. Note: this is optional. 

Share

After you finish your workout, share on Twitter using the hashtags #WOW2022 and #PowerBI, and tag @JSBaucke@MMarie, @shan_gsd, @KerryKolosko, and @NerdyWithData. Also make sure to fill out the Submission Tracker so that we can count you as a participant this week in order to track our participation throughout the year. 

Solution

4 thoughts on “2022 Week 02 | Power BI: Simplified Custom Page Navigation”

    1. Thanks for this feedback, Mazi! I will be sure to fix the resolution next time. Happy to hear you were still able to learn some things!

  1. Hi Shannon, thanks for the video and solution file! May I know how do you display the units in million and billion? I understand in the older desktop version, there is a field formatting option, and we can select the display unit. However, I am unable to find this option in the latest version. Thanks.

    1. Shannon Lindsay

      Hi May! The simplest way is to use the search bar in the formatting pane! Type in “Display” and it’ll bring up the display units (under Values), where you can select, millions, billions, etc. I hope this helps!

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