Drillthrough and Cross-Report Drillthrough in Power BI, Explained

Drillthrough is one of those Power BI features candidates recognize the moment they see it demoed, then can't quite describe when a PL-300 scenario question asks them to pick it out from drill down, drill up, and bookmarks. The four interactions look similar on the surface — they're all ways of navigating a report — but they do genuinely different jobs. This post is about the one that lets you build a dedicated "detail page" a user jumps to with full context already applied, and the newer variant that lets that jump cross between entirely separate reports.

What drillthrough actually does

Drillthrough lets a user right-click a data point in a visual and jump to a different page in the report, with that page automatically filtered to the value they clicked. If you right-click "Contoso Ltd" in a Customers-by-region matrix and choose a drillthrough target called "Customer Detail," you land on that page already filtered to Contoso Ltd — not the whole dataset, not the region, just that one customer.

This is different from drilling down through a visual's own hierarchy (year → quarter → month, inside the same chart) and different from a bookmark (which replays a saved visual state, but doesn't carry a clicked value as a filter). Drillthrough's defining trait is that it transfers a specific filter context to a different page, triggered by a right-click on a data point.

Building a drillthrough page

1. Create the destination page — commonly a page built around one entity, like "Customer Detail" with a card, a few visuals, and maybe a table of transactions.
2. Drag the field you want to drill on (e.g. Customer[Customer Name]) into the Drillthrough well in the Visualizations pane, on that destination page. This is what makes the page a valid drillthrough target for that field.
3. Power BI automatically adds a Back button to the page — don't delete it; it's how users return to where they started.
4. On any other page, right-click a data point whose field matches the drillthrough field, and the destination page appears under Drill through in the context menu.

A page can have more than one field in the drillthrough well — in that case, Power BI requires a value for every field in the well to be present in the right-click context before the target shows up as an option. A common exam trap: a drillthrough target with two fields in the well won't appear if the user right-clicks a visual that only carries one of those two fields in its context.

Keep vs. clear filters on the drillthrough page

There's a toggle most people overlook: Keep all filters (in the drillthrough page's settings). By default, when a drillthrough page already has other filters applied — a slicer, a page-level filter, a visual-level filter — those are preserved in addition to the filter passed in from the drillthrough click. Turning this off means the destination page shows only the filter that was passed in, ignoring any filters already configured on that page. Know this toggle exists; the exam will describe a scenario where a drillthrough page shows unexpected extra filtering and expect you to recognize "Keep all filters" as the explanation.

Cross-report drillthrough: the same idea across report boundaries

Cross-report drillthrough extends this exact mechanic so the destination page lives in a completely different report — potentially owned by a different author, built from a different semantic model, published separately in the Power BI Service. The user experience is the same: right-click, choose a drillthrough target, land on a filtered detail page. What changes is where that target report lives.

To set it up:

1. Both reports must be published to the Power BI Service (cross-report drillthrough does not work purely in Power BI Desktop against local files).
2. In the source report, open File → Options and settings → Options → Report settings, and turn on Allow cross-report drillthrough.
3. In the target report, build the drillthrough page exactly as you would for a same-report drillthrough — drag the matching field(s) into the Drillthrough well.
4. The field names and data types need to line up between the two reports' models for the filter to pass through correctly; they don't have to come from the exact same semantic model, but the value being passed (e.g. a customer name or ID) has to mean the same thing on both sides.

The practical reason this exists: large organizations often split reports by audience or by team ownership rather than building one enormous report, but still want a sales-summary report to drill into a dedicated, separately-maintained customer-detail report without rebuilding that detail page every time. Cross-report drillthrough is the supported way to connect them without merging the underlying files.

Where this shows up on the exam

PL-300 scenario questions in this area tend to test:

• Distinguishing drillthrough from drill down/up — drill down/up navigates a visual's own built-in hierarchy; drillthrough navigates to a different page and requires a field in the Drillthrough well.
• The Keep all filters toggle — recognizing it as the cause when a drillthrough page shows filtering beyond what was clicked.
• Prerequisites for cross-report drillthrough — both reports published to the Service, the setting enabled on the source side, and a matching field configured in the target's drillthrough well. A question describing a cross-report drillthrough that "isn't showing up as an option" is usually testing whether you'd check that setting first.
• Drillthrough vs. tooltip pages — a report page can also be set as a custom tooltip, which is a different mechanism (hover, not right-click; shows inline, doesn't navigate). Don't confuse the two when a question describes "a small page that shows more detail."

Try it yourself

Build two pages in any report with a star schema: a summary page with a matrix by customer, and a detail page with a table of that customer's transactions. Add the customer name field to the detail page's Drillthrough well, then right-click a customer on the summary page. Once that works, toggle Keep all filters on and off and watch how the detail page's results change if you had an unrelated filter already set on it — that's the part scenario questions like to test, and it's much easier to remember once you've seen it misbehave in front of you.