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Power BI Formatting: Page Formatting

Formatting is often overlooked when creating Power BI reports, yet it is something that really elevates a report. I highly recommend spending the time to format or set up a style of formatting reports when you start using Power BI.

To help you on your journey I am doing a Power BI Formatting blog series where we are going to look at different ways you can format Power BI reports.

In today’s example we are going to look at page formatting.

All these formatting options are available when you select the paint roller icon from the visualization tab with NO visuals selected.

If you have a visual selected it will access the formatting options for that individual visual versus the page itself.

Page Size

There are a few different size options available. If you are viewing reports on the Power BI desktop or Power BI online there is no need to switch sizes, but if you plan to export reports different sizes could be beneficial.

  • 16:9
    • This is the default size.
  • 4:3
    • A smaller canvas size that fits less visuals.
  • Letter
    • Switches the report canvas to a portrait orientation versus the default landscape orientation. This would help if you intend to export to a PDF that you would want to print.
  • Tooltip
    • Allows a set of visuals to be placed on a page that will appear as a tooltip on other pages of the report. We will look more into tooltips in a future blog post.
  • Custom
    • Set a custom canvas size.

I usually use the default 16:9 and tooltip sizes when creating reports.

Here are examples of the 16:9, 4:3 and letter size canvases.

Report canvas backgrounds can be customized with a specific color or image and transparency level. Use a higher transparency level to either fade a color or create a watermark effect with an image. Colors can be chosen from the default set or customized using the HEX color or RGB definition.

When working with a page background remember that visuals also have a default background, to see through to the page background individual visuals must have their background turned off or set to 100% transparent.

In the below example we have given our report a 50% transparent grey background. The top two visuals also have their backgrounds set to allow the background to show.

Page Alignment

Choose between top or middle alignment to determine how the report canvas is aligned on the screen.

Wallpaper

The options are the same as setting a page background, but this affects the entire visible screen versus just the canvas portion where visuals are placed. It is extremely helpful if you want to layer an image and color on your background.

In the below example a picture was added to the page background and set at 75% transparency and a grey was set as a color wallpaper. The grey is lighter where the visuals appear because the background of the picture was white and it combined the two colors to make a lighter grey

Filter Pane and Filter Cards

With these formatting options the filter pane appearance in both color and font can be customized. Here is an example of a report with a filter pane that has been customized.

I have not run across a lot of desire to custom this pane as it seems a bit extra, but it is a cool option if you want to give the whole report a streamlined look.

-Jerica Coleman, CRM and Power BI Consultant

 

Benefits of Power BI

Power BI has been growing in popularity over the past few years, but some out there might still be wondering why they should use this tool. Reporting within any organization is important as it can give look at the overall health and performance of your business, spot trends and potential problems and be used for forecasting future opportunities.

Features of Power BI

Power BI has too many features to talk about in one article, but here are the basics you need to know.

With Power BI you can connect to multiple sources and pull them together in a single report. This eliminates the need to piece together reports from multiple systems.

Available visuals, analytics and formatting capabilities allow reports to be extremely customized and provide ways to interact with the data allowing end-users the ability to dig into the results and look at it in multiple ways.

Using Power BI Pro data can be kept up to date with automatic refreshes. No more waiting for a month end report, you can see where you are at daily or even multiple times a day as long as data is being entered into the respective systems.

Now that we’ve reviewed a few key features let’s look at 4 benefits to using Power BI.

Saves Time

Gone are the days when an administrative assistant will need to manually run a report or gather the data and put it together in a single report for their respective teams. With Power BI once the connections are established getting the data can be as easy as logging into a Power BI Pro account to view current stats or, if not using automatic refreshes, it can be a simple click of the refresh button to pull in current numbers.

With the ability to drill down into data managers will no longer have to ask for more information in understanding what is feeding the numbers they can simply drill into a particular data point and get down to the individual transactions behind those numbers, helping them pinpoint issues.

Customizable Experience

Everyone has a certain way they like to see things and with Power BI you can avoid the hassle of creating multiple versions of the same report or trying to get everyone on board with one person’s viewpoint on how the data should be presented.

End-users can establish dashboards and favorites to easily navigate to the visuals they are interested in or be granted the capability to make their own reports from a dataset.

Security levels can be set so one report is created and end-users can be granted permissions to only see data applicable to them.

Higher End-User Buy-In

This is the hope of every report creator that their hard work and time will not be in vain by having a bunch of reports that no one really looks at or uses. With Power BI the ease of navigation, interactivity of reports and the ability to keep reports up to date have dramatically increased end-user buy-in when it comes to reporting.

Power BI Pro also carries the ability to see how many views and who is viewing your reports so you can quickly identify who may not be utilizing the reports and coach them appropriately.

Become Proactive vs. Reactive

Once you have end-user buy-in good reporting starts to pay off as you can make the switch from reacting and putting out fires to proactively changing course as you identify both positive and negative trends. If you are reviewing up to date data you can see a project starting to perform badly and take appropriate action in the middle versus waiting until the end of the project and just trying to do better the next time.

If you are interested in checking out these or some of the other awesome benefits of Power BI check out our library of webinars, other blog posts or reach out to schedule a demo of Power BI.

-Jerica Coleman, CRM and Power BI Consultant

Why Power BI? Sharing Capabilities

Reporting and analytics are only useful if you can share them with the people that need to know and can take action on the results. Let’s take a look at a few ways that you can share data with Power BI.

Sharing report file from Power BI Desktop

This is the only option that does not require a Power BI pro license. Once you have created a report within the Power BI Desktop the report can be saved as a PBIX file. This file can be sent to others or saved in a shared drive for access. Because this exists within the Power BI Desktop the visuals cannot be placed within a dashboard and cannot be automatically refreshed. Data can be manually refreshed or the report can be created using direct query as the method for connecting to the data.

Sharing individual reports/dashboards in Power BI Online

Reports can be shared both within and outside your organization with Power BI online. All users that need to view the report will require a Power BI Pro license or the report must be created with Power BI Premium capacity. Reports can be shared individually with one or more people or they can be published to a workspace. Workspaces are helpful to create when you have a group of people that will need access to more than one report as this eliminates the need to go through the sharing process with each report for multiple people.

Sharing via Teams

Microsoft Teams has a Power BI tab that can be added to your app and once this is activated and users are signed in reports can be shared. Users are required to have a Power BI Pro license or the report must be created with the Power BI Premium capacity to be shared via Teams. Teams is helpful to use if you are already using it as a communication tool as users can view reports within a system they are already accessing on a daily basis and collaboration can be even easier.

Sharing via SharePoint

Reports can also be embedded into SharePoint online. In order to publish to SharePoint a report must first be published to Power BI online and all users that need to view the report will require a Power BI Pro license. If your team uses SharePoint on a daily basis this can be a great option to avoid having to navigate to Power BI online to view reports.

These are a few ways to share data with Power BI and are the main ways I use with customers. There are quite a few others, such as exporting to excel or PowerPoint and even publishing to the web. (Caution: Publishing to the web can be a security risk as data published to the web can be viewed by anyone on the internet.)

Getting data into the right hands as efficiently as possible is a huge asset for any company and with many options available Power BI is an excellent tool to help with this. Contact us if you have any questions on Power BI.

-Jerica Coleman, CRM and Power BI Consultant

 

Why Power BI? Connect to Multiple Sources

When the manager wants to know how their division is performing or the CEO wants to know the overall health of the business what needs to be done?

Do you have to pull up a revenue report from an accounting system, a sales report from a CRM system, a productivity report from a performance tracking system? Perhaps you have a different set of reports to run, but a common complaint I hear from customers is that it is so difficult to know how a business is performing when you have to pull bits and pieces from multiple systems. More often with this type of reporting responses to business problems are reactionary versus proactive.

With Power BI you can connect to databases, such as SQL and Azure, files, such as Excel or CSV/Text, online services, such as Dynamics CRM, Salesforce and Sharepoint along with many more. Pull in data from multiple sources and view data points on a single dashboard or report.

Enabling customers to quickly view and analyze their data allows them to spend more time running their business versus running reports. No more piecing information together from multiple systems, no more combining and manipulating data in excel, no more long hours pulling together weekly, monthly or quarterly results for an operational meeting. With Power BI you set up connections, build the reports and then share with colleagues. At that point any of those working with the data can pull up the report and see how the business is performing.

Here is an example of a sales report pulling from a CRM and an accounting system to show current versus previous sales progress.

Here is an example of a HR report pulling from an employee database and an excel file showing current employee attrition.

These are two basic examples of pulling together more than one set of data, but there are so many more options. For a complete list of data sources you can connect to select “Get data” from the toolbar within Power BI desktop.

Even though there are many others benefits to using CRM this will always be the first thing I mention to customers because it is such an important benefit. Almost all the companies I have worked with have at least two systems they work with and can benefit from pulling the data into a single dashboard. If you are faced with this same issue it’s time to take a look at Power BI. Contact us to learn more.

-Jerica Coleman, CRM and Power BI Consultant