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Hierarchies and Drill Downs

Hierarchies let you organize data into natural levels, like:

Country → State → City

Drill downs then let you navigate between these levels inside a visual, making reports interactive and explorable.

Hierarchies make your visuals feel alive. Click, explore, drill into the data. Your stakeholders will think you're a wizard.

Creating a Hierarchy

A hierarchy is simply a grouping of related fields in a specific order – from broadest to most specific. Power BI lets you create hierarchies by nesting fields together in the Data pane.

Once created, you can use the hierarchy in any visual that supports drill downs, like bar charts, column charts, or tables.

Drill Down Features

Power BI gives you three ways to explore your hierarchy:

Drill Down – Move one level deeper (e.g., Country → State)
Drill Up – Go back up a level (e.g., State → Country)
Expand All – Show multiple levels at once

You can access these by right-clicking on a data point or using the drill icons in the visual header.

Drill downs are one of the easiest ways to impress stakeholders. They love clicking around and exploring the data themselves!

Assignment

Import the geographies.csv file into Power BI. This is some third party research data that we've acquired to better understand population density in areas of interest.
In the Data pane on the right, create a hierarchy from the geography fields: right-click geography_country → Create hierarchy, then drag or right-click to add geography_state and geography_city to it (in that order).

The order matters! Make sure country is at the top, then state, then city. If you add them in the wrong order, you can drag them to rearrange within the hierarchy.
Create a new page (Page 8) and rename it "Geo"
Insert a Clustered Column Chart spanning the full page
Set geography_population as the Y-axis
Set your geography_country Hierarchy as the X-axis
At the top of the chart, turn on drill-down ability, then use the forked "Expand all down one level" arrow to show the hierarchy levels together.

You should start by seeing the lowest drilled down view (a bunch of bars, one for each city). Click the up arrow at the top of the chart to "drill up", and on an individual category to drill down. Play with it until you understand the mechanics.
Format the title: General → Title → Text → "Population by Geography"

Save the project and, from the course directory, submit the CLI tests.