Power BI Design Techniques

Power BI design settings for metrics, bar charts, maps, and other visuals.

Layout Techniques

Color Palette

• Explore trending color palettes using Coolors
• Pick a palette and copy/paste the color codes to the report/visuals

Align/Resize visuals

• Select multiple visuals that need to be aligned
• Go to Visualizations/Format visual/General/Properties
• Update any of these settings: Size, Position, Padding

Whitespace hack for padding

• I wish PBI visuals had a similar behavior as the Box Model in CSS with padding, border, and margin
• Create a shape of the same background color as the visual
  • For example: Insert/Shapes/Rectangle
  • Resize the shape to the same size as the visual
    • Add 20px to the shape’s height and width General/Properties/Size
  • Add rounded corners
    • Select the visual, then General/Effects
    • Set Background to On
      • Set same color as the shape’s background
    • Set Visual Border to On
      • Set same color as the shape’s background
      • Set Rounded corners to 15px
  • Add shadow
    • Set Shadow to On
      • Change the color to a ligher setting than the default
      • Set Position to Custom
        • Set Transparency to 90px
• Organize the layers so the shape is behind the visual
  • View/Selection/Layer order
    • Rename the layer with a proper name
  • Or use Format/Send backward (when selecting the visual)
• Make sure the shape’s color is the same as the visual’s background
• Turn shape’s border to off

Format painter to copy/paste a format

• Click on a visual
• Under the Home menu tab
• Click format painter
• Use paintbrush mouse pointer to click on a similar visual
• This will copy/paste the format to that visual

Gradient Blue Background

If you want to create a background with a gradient to have better contrast and a modern design, you can use an external image and use it as a background.

More about this report in Power BI with Azure and Data Analytics Trends

Power BI Canvas Settings

• Review the canvas size
• The default is type 16:9 (height: 720px, width: 1280px)

Google Drive

• Create a Google Slide
• Set the page setup to 16:9 or select Custom and enter the size in pixels
• Change the background
• Select color
• Go to the Gradient tab
• Add a custom color
• Select any preferred settings
• Download the slide as .svg

Power BI Canvas background

• Without clicking any visual
• Go to the menu Visualizations, then the tab Format page
• Click Canvas background
• Click on Image and upload the svg file
  • Set Image fit to Fit
  • Set Transparency to 0

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Designs for Visuals

Report Text Box Title

• Header: Segoe UI, 18px, Bold
• Subheader/description: Segoe UI Light, 11px

Multi-row Card

• Header
  • Visualizations/General/Title
  • Heading: Heading 3
  • Font: Segoe UI Light, 12px
• Values
  • Visualizations/Visual/Callout values
  • Font: Segoe UI, 18px, Bold
• Labels
  • Visualizations/Visual/Category labels set to On
  • Font: Segoe UI Light, 11px, Bold

Stacked Bar Chart

• Header
  • Visualizations/Format visual/General/Title
  • Heading: Heading 3
  • Font: Segoe UI, 14px, Bold, Left alignment
• Y-Axis, X-Axis
  • Visualizations/Format visual/Y-axis/Values
  • Font: Segoe UI, 9px
  • Max area width: 50%
  • Concatenate labels: ON
• Gridlines
  • Style: Dotted
  • Color: Light grey #C8C6C4
  • Width: 1px
• Bars/Colors
  • Conditional formatting
  • Format style: Gradient
  • What field based on: Sum of Views
  • Summarization: Sum
  • How to format empty values: As zero
  • Minimum: Lowest value
  • Maximum: Highest value
• Bars/Spacing
  • Inner padding: 20px
  • Min category width: 20px

Make a slicer look like a website menu

• Select the slicer
• Format visual/Visual
• Slicer settings
  • Options/Style set to Tile
• Values
  • Font/padding 4px
• Border
  • Bottom
  • Set a color and line width like 10px
• Background
  • Set the same color as the top bar

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Organize the Layers

As you add visuals to the report, you can organize them in layers, and name the visuals with a naming convention.

• Go to View
• Then Selection
• A vertical menu opens with two tabs Layer order and Tab order
• In Layer order, rename the visuals
• Drag/drop the visuals on top of each other
• Optionally, hide visuals
  • This show/hide can also be used when creating bookmarks
  • Create two visuals on the same canvas location
  • For example, sales by year and sales by month
  • Place the layers so they are exactly on top of each other on the canvas
  • When creating a bookmark hide one of the visuals and save it
  • Then swap show/hide for the other visual and create another bookmark

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Visual Tab Order

The adjacent tab says Tab order and it shows this message when you browse over:

Choose the way people tab through your report elements and hear them read by a screen reader.

You can order visuals by drag/drop and choose to hide visuals from this tab browsing.

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Performance Analyzer

• Click on a new a report page
• Click on the Optimize menu tab
• Then Performance Analyzer and Start recording
• Go back to the report
• It shows the duration it takes to execute each layer
• Hidden visualization layers don’t get loaded View/Selection/Layer order
• Expand any element in the analyzer to review duration of each element in a layer/visual

Microsoft has this document on data reduction techniques, which in a way summarizes to this:

From faster to slower

Star schemas, measurements

• Use a DW at the source with data marts, star schemas, and measurement/summary/date tables
• Use Power Query M to create star schema, transformations, and measurement tables
• Use DAX to create tables and measurements

Storage mode, importing data

• Set Storage Mode to DirectQuery and a SQL script to load only what is required
  • Large datasets, real time analytics
• Set Storage Mode to Mixed Mode and a SQL script
• Set Storage Mode to Import and a SQL script

Set Storage mode per table

• Go to Model view
• Select a table
• Go to Advanced
• Select Storage mode
  • You can switch from DirectQuery to Import
  • You cannot switch from Import to DirectQuery