Unique Ask For Drill-Through: Can it be turned off?

While holding a training on Power BI a few weeks ago, I was explaining the differences between a drill through page and drill-down capabilities on a visual. Both are great tools to take advantage of when building your reports. Drill down is wonderful when you want your end-user to see the details of your data on a smaller scale. Think of seeing your data on the country level, then the state level, then the city level, zip code, okay you get the point :) Now, a drill-through page on the other hand will take you to a brand new page where any visual you place on that page will be filtered based on a specific field from a visual on your current page.

So what unique question/request did I get....?

While explaining how a drill-through works, I was asked, "can a drill-through be turned off?" For clarification, I explained "Do you mean if a drill-through was set up by the "state" field and you had multiple visuals with the "state" field could you turn the drill-through off for certain visuals?" They said "EXACTLY."

I had never had that request before, so I immediately went to the formatting pane for the visual itself. There was no toggle on/off switch for drill-through pages though. I still was not quite sure why they wanted to have drill through on for some visuals AND off for others, but that wasn't the point. I had to think of a way to accomplish this.

The solution was quite easy, but my mind was on a one-track loop thinking it could NOT be done since there was no formatting option for the visual to turn it on or off. I had to walk away from the problem for a few minutes, and then it finally dawned on me. To accomplish what they were asking for I would need to duplicate the drill-through column in question in the Power Query editor.

This duplicated column could be used in the visual where drill through capability was NOT wanted to be available. We could then use the original column for visuals that they did want to have the capability.

Now, if I add the new duplicated column to the map visual there should not be the drill-through capability, since the drill through page was set up with the original "State" field.

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