Drilldown & Drill-Through

Two different moves that are easy to confuse — one goes deeper, the other goes elsewhere.

	Drilldown	Drill-Through
What happens	The same visual shows a more granular level of the same data.	The reader is taken to a different report, carrying context with them.
Example	Click a country bar, see states within it.	Click a customer, open the customer detail report for them.
Configured on	The visual.	The report, on both ends.

Drilldown

Drilldown moves within one visual. Click a data point and the visual reloads at the next level of detail; drill up returns.

On drag-and-drop visuals this follows the attributes stacked in the For every box — see Creating Visuals. On query-based visuals you provide the drilldown query yourself and mark where the filter belongs — see Drilldown in Query-Based Visuals.

💡 Tables Drill Too Drilldown isn't only for charts. Tables drill down and up in place, with the parent row staying sticky at the top for context — see Working with Tables.

Drill-Through

Drill-through hands the reader off to another report. It has to be configured at both ends.

On the Destination Report

Open Report Settings and turn on Use as drill through report.
Nominate the parameters it accepts. These are the values a calling report can pass in — the customer, the region, the date range that the destination should open scoped to.

On the Source Report

Open Allow drill through into reports under Advanced.
Add the destination reports readers should be able to reach.

Readers then see a show more details action offering the eligible destinations. Which reports appear depends on the attributes in play where they clicked — a report expecting a customer isn't offered from a chart that has no customer in it.

ℹ️ Access Still Applies Drill-through does not bypass sharing. A reader without access to the destination report cannot reach it this way.

Analyse the Change

A related move, on the same menu: where a visual is configured for change analysis, a reader can ask why a value moved between two adjacent points and get a breakdown of what contributed to the difference.

💡 Choosing Between Them Use drilldown when the answer is more rows of the same shape. Use drill-through when the answer needs different fields, a different grain, or a different audience's report entirely — trying to force that into one visual usually produces a report that serves neither purpose.