We’re going to learn a bit more about our Formatting options in Power BI Desktop in this post. Power BI has some page formatting options that are good to know about if you need them.

Post Subjects: User Interface | Formatting 

The Page Formatting tools show up when you have nothing selected in your report. So, if you click somewhere on your Canvas that doesn’t have a visual, you’ll see a Page + Paintbrush icon show up on the Visualizations Pane. These are the options for customizing your page.

If you’d like to do explore page formatting like I do in the below video, you can download the Power BI Desktop file I use here:

Video:

Let’s go through them section-by-section. They are all relatively straightforward.

Page Information

This section is the very basics. We can change the page name here and we can also indicate that we want to use a page as a Tooltip. This will be covered in another post, but basically you can create custom tooltips by designing a page to act as a tooltip (the little hover boxes that can appear when a mouse hovers over data) and then turning on that functionality with this switch.

There is also a section called “Allow Q&A” which can be turned on and it asks for possible terms/names for the page. This is used by the Q&A visual, which allows users to ask questions of data in the report.

To be frank, as of right now, I don’t use the Q&A visual much (and don’t recommend using it) because I find it to not be very smart. It has problems with simple concepts like the words “increasing” and “decreasing” which is a problem if users are looking for trends.

We’ll do a post all about Q&A visual and figure it all out.

Canvas Settings

This section is where you can control how large your page is in pixels. The Type dropdown gives you some standard options like 16:9 and 4:3 ratios, but also a small Tooltip size as well as Custom size settings. So, if you design a page that needs to be longer than it is wide, you can totally set your pages to be exactly the size you need them to be. Yes, you can make scrollable dashboards.

The Vertical alignment setting lets you set where your canvas sits in the report. That sounds a little vague, I know. Do you see the very faint outline around our canvas? That’s where all our visuals go, and we can align it on the “background” (the area outside of the canvas) to either sit at the top of the background or sit in the middle.

Canvas Background

This is, you guessed it, about the Canvas background. If you want to change your canvas background color you can do it here. 

You can also bring in images for your Canvas background and select how you want them to fit on the canvas.

The image above is by Christian Palmer on Unsplash.

Wallpaper

The Wallpaper section basically does the exact same thing as the Canvas background section, but for the area outside of your canvas. You can pick a color and/or an image for it.

Filter Pane

These settings determine how the Filter Pane looks, and at first you may be thinking “The Filter Pane is not part of the page…” but you can make it part of the page. If we look at our Filter Pane there’s a little eye icon and if it’s not crossed out then the Filter Pane is accessible to users when they are viewing your report. If it’s crossed out they don’t get access to it.

The Filter Pane formatting options let you change how the Filter Pane looks. It’s mostly color and font options for different aspects of the pane.

Filter Cards

Much like the Filter Pane options, these options let you customize how the cards you build IN the Filter Pane look. It’s mostly colors and fonts

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You don’t want to get too wild here, but if you want to let your users have access to a Filter Pane and you want to use some colors that fit in with your organization’s branding, this is a way to do it.

Think about visual usability

If you are using darker colors / images for backgrounds you’ll have to make sure your reports and charts are still easy to read and see. One way is to make your visual backgrounds transparent (go into General Formatting, then Effects, then Background and turn them OFF) and adjust your chart formatting to make sure your charts are visible with a different background though.

Have a question about Page Formatting? Leave a comment below and we’ll figure it out!

Take care,

Joe.