Business Intelligence with Power BI

L09 · Interactivity

Practice — Hot · Solution

1 · A Briefing page that survives fifteen seconds

One strong version: four visuals, four claims. "2026 is beating target in every region (West: 112.7%)" over the attainment bar with its 100% line. "Growth runs ahead of last year in all six months" over the two-line YoY chart. "Furniture and Outdoor carry two-thirds of revenue" over the sorted bar. "May outsells December — the outdoor season is our second holiday" over the monthly line. Cards for Total Revenue and Gross Margin %. One Year slicer, defaulted to the current year. Nothing else. Every title is a sentence the CFO can repeat in the board call without opening the page again — which is the actual job.

2 · A handover note that would hold

"Pages: Briefing (answers — don't add controls), Explore (the cockpit), Category Detail (drillthrough only — never navigate by tab, the title depends on the drill context). Bookmarks: 'Reset — Explore' captures the full designed state INCLUDING the 2026 scope, wired to the Clear button; 'Revenue/Units view' capture Display only — if you recapture them, keep Data unchecked or they will stomp reader slicers. Interactions: the Explore bar filters (not highlights) the line and card — deliberate; cards must never be left on Highlight. Drillthrough field is Category; the Detail Title measure falls back to 'All Categories' when no single category is in context. Most likely to bite you: editing the Detail page's visuals can silently sever their response to the drill filter — after ANY change there, drill through on Decor and check the top-10 table for products that cannot be Decor's. That check has caught the bug twice."

Reflection answers

  • Most students fight hardest to keep drillthrough off the Briefing — "what if the CFO wants to click in?" The frame's answer: if they want to explore, the cockpit exists one button away; putting doorways on the answer page re-creates the two-audience mongrel the split existed to kill. An answer page's discipline IS its value.
  • Strong choices name a silent state bug (severed drill interactions, a recaptured greedy bookmark) rather than a visible feature — because interactivity's real risks are exactly the invisible-state class this module kept finding. A "most likely to bite" that names something a reader would notice unaided was not the most likely to bite.