Welcome to the post about how to FORMAT a table visual in Power BI. This post will go over some basic table visual design principles to make your table visuals easier on your audience, because tables show a LOT of data at once.

If you want to use the same Power BI file I use in the below video and written notes, here’s the pbix file to download. You can also click the graphic below to get it.

Video Instructions:

Written Instructions:

We’re using a simple Power BI file to learn about basic Table Visual formatting. In fact it’s basically the same file that we end the How to make a Table Visual tutorial with.

It’s got one simple table, and it’s the exact default formatting that Power BI gives us when we create a table.

There is a LOT of possible formatting with Table Visuals, and you can explore them at your leisure by (while your table visual is selected) clicking into the formatting tab in the Visualizations Pane.

We’ll have posts about a bunch of these, but for now, let’s concentrate on the basics for formatting this Table Visual to make it easier for our viewers to easily read and digest.

Do you need totals?

First off, let’s look at that Total row on the bottom. It’s handy, but if your viewers don’t need a total, we can take it out.

Just click into the Totals section in the Formatting options and flip the Values on/off switch to OFF.

Better Headers!

We’re going to make our headers a bit more user-friendly with some small tweaks. The goal here is to help our viewer know exactly what rows in this table are data and which is the header in a split-second, and have the column names make sense.

First, while our column headers are mostly self explanatory, Power BI sums numerical columns by default, so when we add a numerical column, it changes the name Value to Sum of Value…

Unless your table is summing up this value because it’s aggregating one of your other columns (see the How to make a Table Visual post for more about this), this table is simply showing the Value. There’s no need for it to say “Sum of” too. It’s superfluous.

Let’s rename this column by right-clicking the Value column where we added it to the Visualizations Pane and selecting the “Rename for this visual” option.

Then you can rename it to whatever you want.

Next, we’re going to use color to differentiate our headers from our data a little better.

It’s doing an okay job right now, with that one little blue horizontal line, but we’re going to make the difference between headers and data even more pronounced.

First, we’ll remove that blue line by going into our Formatting options, opening up the Grid section, the then the Border subsection. The default setting for this is a blue line 1 pixel wide, but it won’t let us reduce the width to 0 OR turn it off completely (Gee, thanks Microsoft), so we’ll do the next best thing and turn it white so it blends into our background.

Next we’ll go into the Column headers formatting to adjust our header font and background colors. If we truly want our headers to be visually different from our data, we can bold them, even make them a larger font size, but we can ALSO use color to help us with this.

Choose a color with high contrast with white and choose that for your Background color. I’ll choose dark blue for this example.

Then choose white for the Font color.

That along with a larger font and bolding gives you this:

It’s an instantly better Table Visual with this one small change.

Get Aligned

Power BI was smart enough to left align our text columns and right align our numerical column (because WORDS are read left-to-right in large sections of the world and NUMBERS are easier to read if the numbers line up… 1s, 10s, 100s, 1,000s, etc)

However it’s NOT smart enough to right-align the header of a numeric column, so we need to do it so it doesn’t look all goofy.

To to this we’ll go back into our Formatting options. This time we’re NOT going to go into the Column headers section (which would make sense), but rather then Specific Column section.

In there we can select our Value column and then set the alignment. We want both the header and the values right-aligned, so we’ll make sure their on/off switches are ON, and then we’ll click the right alignment button at the bottom.

Get rid of shading

Default Power BI Table Visuals have alternate row shading, and people like accountants freaking LOVE this shading. It’s a holdover from the olden days when most stuff was on paper. Accountants needed an easy way to guide their eyes across many many columns of data, up and down many many rows.

These aren’t really needed in Power BI Tables, for 2 reasons.

1. You shouldn’t be making massive Table Visuals in Power BI. We visualize data to make it easier to digest. Big large tables with a big data dump of information do NOT help this. Go and have a look at the How to make a Table Visual post where I go into why Table visuals are the worst, but CAN be useful in a few situations IF used properly.
2. When your Power BI report user puts their mouse over any part of row of data, the whole row is highlighted a bit, making all this shading unnecessary.

However, having some kind of horizontal aide to help our eyes (and brain) across a row of data can still be useful when someone isn’t hovering their mouse over a table.

So we’re going to get rid of the shading and put in lines instead. Shading is overkill in this situation. It doesn’t help with Accessibility either, as it reduces the contrast between your font and the background.

We’ll go into our Formatting options again, and into the Values section. We’re going to keep our ‘Background color’ white and also make our ‘Alternate background color’ white.

By turning off the Alternate background shading, we discover that there are faint grey horizontal lines already added to our table (if you want to adjust these go into the Grid section in the Formatting options).

They do exactly what the shading did (help our eyes across a row of data) but are a less obtrusive way to do it.

Those are the basics of GOOD Table visual formatting in Power BI. Pay attention to Totals, Headers, Alignment, and Shading EVERY Time.

I do. Every time.

Take care everyone,

Joe.

Like these posts but need more formal (but still engaging and fun) training in Power BI? Contact me, Joe Travers or at joe@traversdata.com. I got you.

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