Power BI Personal Bookmarks Every Report User Should Know
- Anne Adair-Major
- Mar 28
- 3 min read
Power BI personal bookmarks let end users save customized views of any report, including filters, slicers, sort orders, and cross-highlights, without changing the report for anyone else. This is an incredibly useful feature even at its most basic level, and yet most people never use them, which means they are missing an opportunity to go from passively reading to saving themselves time, or even actively adding value through it.
I've been working with Power BI across enterprise organizations for 8 years, and this feature barely comes up. During Power BI rollouts and even in BAU, the conversation so often solely focuses on data sources, semantic models or licensing, and not about what end users can actually do to get the most out of their reports. At Adair-Major Consulting, I always start with planning and delivery on how to get more from the Power BI reports you already have, and personal bookmarks are a great, easy, native feature that can honestly help anyone who uses Power BI.
I want to share more about them, because it goes much further than saving filters.
The basics are useful, but they're not the point
A personal bookmark saves the entire state of a report page. The whole view, exactly as you set it up. You can save up to 20 per report, and I especially like that you can set one as your default so the report opens your way every single time.
That means no more resetting your region, date range, and team filters every Monday before you can actually think about the data. But honestly, if that were all it did, I probably wouldn't be writing about it!
Where it gets interesting with Power BI Personal Bookmarks
In the video, I walk through the full progression. But let me tease you with a few bits that I think matter most.
Say you're on a Teams call and you need to walk through three different views of the same report: ops, finance, and a regional breakdown. Without bookmarks, you're clicking through filters live while everyone watches. I can't be the only one who hates that spotlight, making everyone wait while you drag down what feels like a never ending dropdown list, it's not a great look. But if you've saved each view as a personal bookmark, you can step through them in order using the forward and back arrows in the bookmarks pane. It works like a slideshow of your saved views without the PowerPoint export, and no copying charts into a deck. What you have is live and prepared views, one after another, straight from the report.
How Power BI comments and personal bookmarks work together
The comments pane in Power BI lets you attach a comment to a specific bookmarked view of a report, so that anyone who clicks your comment lands in your filtered view with your context already there. This might be one of the most underused features in all of Power BI, and in the video I go into detail on how to set it up.
What it means in practice is that someone on your team, your manager, a new starter, whoever needs that particular view, can click your comment and land straight in the exact report state you saved, with your notes right there beside it. They don't need to set the filters themselves, and you don't need to be available to walk them through it. Your expertise just lives on the report now, available to anyone who opens it.
And you can do this with any slice of the report you understand better than others. You're not just opening the report and reading it anymore; you're adding to it. You're making it more useful for the people around you, and that's a fundamentally different way to use a tool that most people treat as read-only.
I think this is the bit that really matters. Personal bookmarks and comments turn end users from passive report readers into active contributors, and that's a layer of value that most organisations aren't getting from Power BI yet. The time savings are great, and presenting with bookmarks instead of fumbling with filters is a big plus, but this is where you actually contribute something back to a report. Your knowledge, your experience with that data, it now has a home right on the report itself instead of sitting in your head or buried in a Teams chat from three weeks ago that nobody can find.
If you're thinking about how your end users interact with Power BI, or how to get more out of what you've already invested in, that's exactly the kind of thing I help organisations figure out. Always happy to have the conversation.
