Bookmarks and Buttons
Natarajan Manivasagan
A bookmark is a snapshot of state, not a page
The easiest way to misunderstand bookmarks is to think of them like browser bookmarks — a saved link to somewhere. They're closer to a saved snapshot: filter selections, slicer values, sort order, the visibility of individual objects, and their position and size, all captured together as one named state that can be reapplied later. A bookmark doesn't take you to a different page so much as it puts the current page into a specific, predetermined configuration.
What actually gets captured
When you create a bookmark, the pane offers three capture options: Data (current filters, slicers, and sort), Display (which objects are visible and their formatting), and Current page. By default all three are on, which is usually right — but leaving Data captured when you only meant to toggle which visuals are showing is the most common way a "just show/hide this chart" bookmark ends up quietly also resetting someone's filter selections when they click it.
Buttons are what trigger them
A button on its own does nothing until you give its Action formatting setting a type — Bookmark, Page navigation, Back, or a few others — and point it at the bookmark you want. The button and the bookmark are two separate objects; the button is just one of several possible triggers (others include images and shapes with the same Action setting) for applying that saved state.
The pattern that scales: tabs via bookmark groups
The most common real use of bookmarks is faking a tabbed interface on a single page: several groups of visuals stacked on top of each other, each visible only when its matching bookmark is applied, with a row of buttons across the top that each apply one bookmark. Doing this cleanly depends on the Selected visuals option available when editing a bookmark — it lets a bookmark control the visibility of specific objects only, leaving everything else (including the report's actual filters) untouched. Skipping this and letting each bookmark capture the entire page's state is exactly what causes tab-style navigation to break the moment someone adds an eighth "tab" and forgets one bookmark still has an older layout baked in.
Grouping bookmarks together
The Bookmarks pane lets you organize related bookmarks into a group, which matters for exactly this tab pattern: applying any bookmark in a group can be set to first reset every other bookmark in that group, so switching tabs doesn't require each individual bookmark to explicitly re-hide everything the others show. Without a group, every bookmark has to account for undoing every other bookmark itself, which is the other common way this pattern rots as a report grows.