Labs · Power BI

Lab: Build a City Details Page and Drill Through to It from a Bar Chart

By Ravindra Bagale · Last updated: 8 October 2026

Suppose we are…

Suppose we built the Croma sales overview, and the Pune store manager calls: "My city is below target. Show me exactly which orders we got." We do not want a separate report per city. We want one details page that opens for whichever city is right-clicked. That is drill through. The numbers are sample data made up for practice.

Goal of this lab

By the end you will have:

• An Overview page with a bar chart of sales by city.
• A City Details page with City as its drill-through field, two cards and an order table.
• Right-clicked Pune and landed on its 6 orders (24 units, 346,000), then come back with the Back button.

What you need (all free)

• Power BI Desktop and your Lab-12-hierarchy-groups.pbix (or Lab 11) file.
• Sample data if you need to rebuild: Download pbi_sales.csv (24 orders) Download pbi_cities.csv
• 30 minutes.

The data: before and after

Before. The main page: one bar per city, no detail.

After. Right-click Pune → Drill through → City Details: only Pune's six orders.

The formula

We add one helper measure for the details page:

Orders = COUNTROWS ( pbi_sales )

Drill through works by passing a filter. When you right-click Pune and choose City Details, Power BI opens that page with the filter City = Pune already applied, exactly as if you had added a page filter by hand. Every visual on the page then calculates its measures (Orders = 6, Total Sales = 346,000) for Pune only.

Steps

1. Open your Lab 12 file and Save as Lab-17-drill-through. Rename the first page Overview (double-click the page tab).
2. On Overview, make a Clustered bar chart: Y-axis pbi_cities[City], X-axis Total Sales, sorted descending, data labels on.
3. If you do not have it yet, add the measure Orders = COUNTROWS ( pbi_sales ) (right-click pbi_sales → New measure).
4. Click + at the bottom to add a page. Rename it City Details.

5. On City Details, click empty canvas. In the Visualizations pane, scroll down to Drill through and drag pbi_cities[City] into Add drill-through fields here.

   👁 What you should see: a Back arrow button appears at the top left of the page automatically.

6. Add two Cards: Orders and Total Sales.

7. Add a Table with pbi_sales[OrderID], DateTable[Date], pbi_products[Product], Units (or pbi_sales[Units]) and Total Sales. Sort it by Date.

   👁 What you should see: right now it shows all 24 orders, because no city is passed yet.

8. Add a Text box at the top with the words City details (we make this title dynamic in Lab 20).

9. Go back to Overview. Right-click the Pune bar → Drill through → City Details.

   👁 What you should see: the City Details page opens. The Filters pane shows City is Pune. Cards: 6 orders and 346K. Table: SO-1002, SO-1006, SO-1010, SO-1014, SO-1018, SO-1022, with 24 units in total.

10. Hold Ctrl and click the Back button (in Power BI Desktop, buttons need Ctrl+click while editing).

    👁 What you should see: back on Overview.

11. Try Nagpur: right-click → Drill through → City Details. Then right-click the City Details page tab → Hide page, so users only reach it by drilling through. Save.

    👁 What you should see: for Nagpur, 6 orders and 260K. The hidden page tab looks faded in Desktop.

Common mistakes

Self-check checklist

Try-at-home challenge

Make the details page also work from a Product chart, so that right-clicking Laptop on any Product chart opens a page with only Laptop orders. Do you need a new page, or can City Details do both?

Samjla ka? A drill-through page receives the filter of the bar you right-click. Aata pudhe jaauya: show the product split in a tooltip when you hover over a city.