The PBIX file is available at the end of the article.

I started implementing these guided tours about a year ago for all reports that exceed a 10 person audience. My thought process is if a small group of people are going to use the report, odds are they can navigate it with ease because repetition.

However, if I’m developing a report that is going to be shared by dozens, or hundreds, of people then I provide a simple guided tour activated by a Help button.

People change jobs, move departments, or maybe they only use the report once a month. Odds are — they will probably need a refresher.

Many developers will stick a tooltip on it and call it a day, but the Help button can do so much more. It can serve as a reminder and introduction on how to navigate the report. It can also offer suggestions, tips, and guidance on how to use the report so people can skip the being confused part of the user experience.

Help buttons are one of simplest yet most effective features I’ve implemented in my workflow. And yes, your end users will thank you for it.

Ironically, the start of this process happens at the end of development.

I’ve found it’s easiest, and the best use of your time, to add the guided tour when you are completely finished developing your report.

The reason for this, is because the guided tour is made possible through Bookmarks, and if you have used bookmarks in the past you know they have one view and that’s it — they act as a screenshot of your report that you can come back to again and again.

That bookmark will be our focus in this guide.

Easiest step in the process.

Navigate to: Insert → Buttons → Help

Drop the button anywhere on your report. I usually go top-right or bottom-left — somewhere out of the way but still easy to spot.

Optionally, you can add a little text like “Need help?” if you want it to stand out more.

I’m going to use a sample report I’ve mocked up with random patient data.

To create the overlay page we’re going to add a rectangle shape across the entire report. Change the color to black and set the transparency to 75%.

You should have a dimmed layer above your report that looks like this:

Navigate to View and select both Bookmarks and Selection panes.

Under Selection, rename the rectangle shape you just created to Help Background. Setting up naming conventions early on will help with organization later on and make things less confusing.

Bookmarks can be a learning curve for many. We don’t need a deep dive into the functionality of bookmarks for the scope of this guide, all we need to do is add two bookmarks, one called Help Active and Help Inactive.

Click the three dots next to each bookmark and make sure Data is unchecked and Display and Current Page are checked.

Now we can link the visuals to the respective bookmarks.

Click the eye symbol next to Help Background shape, then update the Help Inactive Bookmark.

The result should be a toggle effect when you click on each bookmark.

You can probably see where we are going with this. When the Help Inactive bookmark is selected, specific items in our report are being hidden, and they reappear for Help Active.

Now that we have two functioning bookmarks, one for activating the guided help and one for deactivating it, we can start adding information to our guide.

Select the Help Active bookmark.

I’ve added several speech bubble shapes and text boxes to my report, but you can add whatever helps explain your report here. Avoid adding too much stuff, the point is to keep it simple and add what you think is necessary for context.

Select the Help Inactive bookmark. The new shapes and text boxes will remain on the page; we can simply hide them like we did the overlay page. Hide all the shapes and text boxes then update the Help Inactive page.

Now when we toggle back and forth between the Inactive and Active help pages we should have the following result:

We can’t expect our end users to hunt down these bookmarks so what can we do to make it easy and accessible? Our Help Button!

Go back to the Help Button we made and navigate to Action. Set the Type to Bookmark and assign it to Help Active. This will activate the bookmark when we click on the button.

As the developer you will likely need to do a ctrl+click, but once the report is published the end users only need to single click the button.

Notice when we click the Help button our guided tour turns on, but how can we turn it off?

That’s where our other bookmark comes in. We need to assign the Help Inactive bookmark to the rectangle shape that works as our overlay!

Select the Help Background shape and assign it to the Help Inactive bookmark. Now when end users click on the background it will close out of the guided tour — which feels more natural from an end user. When we click out of something we expect it to go away. I’ve also added an exit button ‘X’ in the past and that works too.

Go through the process a few times. Select the Help button, the guided tour should pop up, click on the background and the guided tour should go away and the report should be fully visible.

I’d call this an intermediate-level feature at first attempt, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes very simple, fast, and flexible. There are countless ways to incorporate this method into reports.