Microsoft’s Power BI is enabling more than 150,000 organizations to make data-driven decisions, including 97% of Fortune 500 organizations. Organizations are bringing over 45 petabytes of data to Power BI every month, creating 40M reports and dashboards to foster a data-driven culture in their organization.
– Microsoft
Over the years, Power BI has sparked the imagination of data enthusiasts worldwide. The Power BI community of more than 1 million members is deeply engaged in the development and evolution of Power BI. They are continuously releasing new capabilities to deliver amazing data experiences that empowers customers to take charge of their data. In the recent Power BI Desktop release in February, Microsoft announced the Public Preview of Power BI visual formatting pane, significantly improving the authoring experience for mobile-optimized reports.
The new feature simplifies the creation of mobile-optimized reports. Reports can now be styled and formatted with visuals that look attractive on the mobile devices, without impacting their formatting in web layout. The new formatting options include the ability to update fonts, sizes, colors, and more.
The Business Value of Mobile-Optimized Power BI Reports
Interactive mobile-optimized Power BI reports deliver analytical insights related to the performance of your business in the palm of your hand. This allows businesses to spend less time prepping and consuming their data and more time turning their data-driven insights into action through its immersive and interactive dashboards.
The Visual Formatting Pane in Mobile Layout
The addition of the visual formatting pane in Power BI gives users flexibility and unlimited design possibilities for beautifying and optimizing their Power BI reports for phone viewing. However, users need to ensure that they have switched on the preview feature to leverage this new capability. Follow the settings given below to switch it on:
File > Options and Settings > Options > Preview Features > Modify Visuals Settings for Mobile Layout
Once these settings are enabled, on editing or changing the view of a report to mobile layout, users will see the newly added format pane. Furthermore, users will never find the changes made to the mobile layout appearing on the desktop layout of the report.
Benefits of Power BI Visual Formatting Pane for Creating a Mobile Layout
Earlier, most users would struggle with the font-size, pixels, and shapes while transforming desktop layout of a report to fit the small screen space of mobile devices. However, the Power BI visual formatting pane empowers users to do more than just transforming the layout, making it much easier for the users to understand the data and insights when viewed from a mobile phone. Below we have enlisted some of the extended capabilities in Power BI that enable better visualization of reports for mobile devices:
1: Change grid orientation and style settings of the page navigator button
Users are empowered to change the orientation of the page navigator seamlessly from vertical desktop layout to horizontal layout. This makes the navigation to different sections easier for users even when viewing the report on mobile devices.
2: Modify existing shapes to fit mobile screens
It is not mandatory that shapes that look good on a desktop would look similar on a mobile device. Considering the size limitations on a mobile screen, users can change the shapes in their report layout to make it look much more pleasing even on mobile.
3: Change a visual’s font size
Users face issues with font size when transforming reports from a desktop layout to a mobile-friendly layout. Luckily, that issue is resolved in the latest Power BI capability release.
4: Create a pixel-perfect design with size and position settings
The latest public preview enables users to manually change a visual’s size and position properties which wasn’t supported in earlier editions. Simply select the object and change its size or position to make it a better fit for mobile devices.
5: Optimize chart settings to maximize real estate
The font size and placement of values create impediments for users, when reports are viewed from mobile devices. To overcome such issues, users can now optimize their charts settings to make it look good, and more importantly, it is now much easier to understand its data and insights when viewed from a mobile phone.
Transform your Reporting
The possibilities with Power BI are endless. Some organizations leverage Power BI to bring harmony to multiple data sets, while others want to streamline their reporting processes. AgreeYa has been helping organizations fully harness their data’s value, enhance data exploration, and establish a data-driven enterprise culture by leveraging Power BI. If you would like to know more about Power BI’s endless reporting capabilities and unveil its true potential, reach out to us.