Hi, it's Leila here. So today, we're going to
cover 10 tips and techniques to enhance your Power BI reports. We're going to cover a wide
range. There's going to be formatting tips, organizing tips, and productivity tips.
I'm curious if you've used any of these, so let me know in the comments as
you're watching. Now, let's get started. Tip number 1. Conditional format your charts.
You can add conditional formatting to your charts. So here, I'm showing the growth rate to previous
year. I have negative and positive values here. I want the negative values to have a different color
to the positive ones. To do that, select the chart, go to Format options, down here, select Data Colors.
And then, click on this effects icon. Here, you can decide how you want to conditionally format your
chart. I'm going to select Rules. The field name is fine. Now, we can decide on our logic. So, I want
negative values to be in red, so if the value is less than zero, it should have a red color. Let's go
with this one. Add a new rule for positive values. If it's greater than or equal to zero, not percent, the number, and less than. We just have to remove this, so it defaults to Max, or you
can change this to a hundred percent. Then we want another color, I'm going to go with a green color.
Let's just go with this one, click on OK, and the conditional formatting is automatically applied
to your chart. If I change my selection to 2020, it pulls through as well. Tip number 2. Aligning
Objects. When you're laying out your dashboard, it's important to properly align your object. Now
you can do that manually if you click on a visual, and then you drag it. You get some help from these
dotted red lines. But if you have a lot of objects, this is going to be a headache to do manually. What
you want to do is automatically align these. First thing you need to do is select your objects. I'm
going to select them like this. Go to Format, Align. Let's align these to the top, and if you want them
to be distributed properly, go back to Align and select distribute horizontally. Let's align these
in a different way, so you can also multi-select by holding down Control and selecting each object.
Go back to Format, Align, align to the left, and now, for these ones, let's distribute these vertically.
With the object selected, you can also move them as one, and then place them wherever you need to
on your dashboard. Next tip, organize your measures. If you have a lot of different measures and you
want to organize them to a separate measures table, this is what you can do. Click on "Enter data"
to create a dummy table. You can give this table the name that you want your measures table to
be called. I'll call mine "KPI," and then click on Load. We're going to see the table added here, it
just has a single column right now. But, let's say, under Data, I already have some measures that
I want to move to this KPI table. Let's start with this one first. When I select this, I can see
measure tools pop up here, and the Home table is currently Data, because this is where it's sitting
in. I'm going to change that to the new KPI table. Now, I have my first measure added to this. But I
want my measures table to be on top here, right? All I need to do is remove this column here. I'm
just going to right-mouse-click and hide it from the model, and immediately my KPI table gets a
different icon set and it jumps on top. This now is a dedicated measures table. I can move all the
other measures to this table. But I don't want to go to each single measure and do this manually,
instead I want to do it all at once. To do that, go to Relationships, click on Data, and there are
more options here, select the measures. This is going to automatically select all the measures
in this table. Now from the properties menu here, adjust the Home table to be the new KPI table.
This way, all my measures automatically shifted to my measures table. Tip number 4. Organize your
measures into different folders. In case you have a lot of measures, you can put them in separate
folders. To do that, go to the Model side and select the measures you want to put in a folder. So, you
can multi-select, just hold down Control. In this case, I'm going to select the quantity measures and
create a display folder here. I'll want them inside a folder called "Quantity." That's automatically
going to organize them in this folder. You can repeat for other measures, I'm just going to
select these and put these in the "Sales" folder. Now, when I jump to my reporting tab here, we
can see my measures are organized accordingly. Tip number 5. Pimp up your dashboard with custom
backgrounds. So here, I've set up this dashboard but I want it to stand out more; I want it to look
nicer. I can use a custom image background for it. One way to do this is set it up in PowerPoint. So
here, I have a PowerPoint slide and I've added all of these different objects to the slide, then save
this as a PNG. So, you can do that by going to File, Save As or Save a Copy in this case. From this drop
down, select PNG. Once you have it saved as a PNG, go back to your dashboard, click in an empty
area just to make sure no object is selected, then go to the Format options. Down here, you're
going to see page background. You can decide on a color for your background. Right, so if you didn't
want to use an image, you can select a color and turn transparency off, so you can see that
color. In this case, I want to add an image, so I'm going to click on Add Image, select
the PNG, mine is called this. Click on Open, and it's going to bring it to the background, but
you can't see it if transparency is on, so we are going to turn transparency off. And now, we can see
our dashboard already looks a lot fancier. And then here, you also have some options for fitting the
image. I'll go and select Fit. You can then adjust the other visuals that you have. So, for example,
for the title here, I don't want it to have that white background, so I'm going to select it and turn
off the background, and then I want the text to be white, so let's just select this and adjust the
font color to white. Okay, so here, you're free to design any type of background you want for
your dashboards. Next tip, customize your tooltips. In Power BI, whenever you hover over any of
these visuals, you get this default tooltip text. You can customize that. If I select this one, for
example, and scroll down here, I can see tooltips and I can add additional fields to this that I
don't have in this visual. So, in this case, I'm going to grab Total Quantity and add it to
tooltips. Now, whenever I hover over this, I get Total Sales and I also get Total Quantity. Now,
in addition to just adding tooltips here, you can create separate tooltip pages and show whatever
visual or text or graphic that you want to show. To do that, first you need to add a new page.
I'll just call it "mytips," then go to Format here. Under Page Information, change this to tooltip. So
turn this on for tooltip. Scroll down, for page size, change this as well to tooltip. Page alignment, I'm
just going to update this and put it in the middle. Now, it's up to you whatever you want to add
to this tooltip, go ahead and do it. One thing I want to do is insert a text box, and type in "Top
5 Customer Groups," because let's say, that's what I want to show in my tooltip. I'm going to make this
bold and center it. I also want to add a table that shows the customer groups, so I'm going to find
them under Master Customer data, that's right here. And then, add in Total Sales. Let's place a check
mark here. Now, I might have a lot of groups, so I want to restrict this to the top five. Let's add
a filter for this visual, click on this drop down and change this to Top N. I want to see the top
five based on total sales, I'm just going to drag and drop this here. Now, let's apply the filter
and I have Top 5 Customer Groups here. Let's just give this more breathing space,
and adjust the sort order. So now that we have our tooltip page in place, let's go back to our
visual here and use that. Collapse the filters, select the visual, go to Format options. Under Tooltip, we're going to change the Type from default to a Report page. Now, the only tooltip page I have
is the one I called "mytips," so we're going to go with that. Now, check this out. Whenever I hover over any
of these, I get to see the Top 5 Customer Groups, and they're going to be different depending
on my selection. Tip number 7. Add a page navigator to your dashboard. This is like creating
an automatic table of contents for your dashboard. Power BI recently got an update that allows you
to do that automatically. Just go to Insert, Buttons. All the way on the bottom, you're going to see
Navigator, select Page Navigator. This automatically adds buttons for your pages. You have some options
to adjust this. For example, under Pages, you can decide if you want to show or hide hidden pages.
If you want to show tooltip pages or hide them. If I select show, we're going to see my tooltip page.
If I hide it, it's automatically going to disappear. If you rename tabs or add new tabs, this
automatically gets adjusted. You can change the shape as you need. Default is rectangle, but you
can go with oval, arrow, heart, and so on. If you want to jump to a specific page on the desktop, you have
to hold down Control, and then select the button. On the web, you just have to click on a button. Next
tip, create a back button. So this tip is related to the previous tip. Remember we created a page
navigator where we can jump to different pages. Now would be nice to have a way to go back.
All you have to do is go to Insert, Buttons, and select Back. This is going to automatically
insert a back button for you. You can position this where you want. Now, whenever you select it, so
remember on desktop, I have to use Ctrl + click, I'm going to go back to the main page. Next tip is
to lock objects. Once you've set up your dashboard and you're happy with the layout, you want to
make sure that no one unintentionally goes in and moves these different objects around. You
want to lock them in place. To do that, press Ctrl + A to select all the objects. Go to View and place
a check mark for Lock Objects. Now, everything is locked into place, no one can unintentionally
move these around. Tip number 10. Save your reports as PDF. You can create a PDF file out of all
your reports that you have on your dashboard. All you need to do, go to File, Export and Export
to PDF. This is going to go through each tab, so it might take some time, but once it's done, it's going
to generate one PDF document for you. A few moments later... And this is our PDF document. So, it's going to
put it in a temporary folder, but you can click on Save As and save it in the folder that you want.
Okay, so those are my tips for now. Please share any cool tips of your own in the comments below
as well. I'm really looking forward to reading those. Thank you for watching, thank you for being
here and I'm gonna see you in the next video.
