5 DESIGN TRICKS that Make EVERY Power BI Report Look GREAT!

are you looking for ways to improve the design of your power bi report now in this video I'm going to show you how in five quick and easy steps you can make any power bi report look good and transform something that looks like this into this now let's get started [Applause] welcome to how to power bi my name is boss and this is the very first time for you visiting this channel then make sure to hit that subscribe button to stay up to date on all of my videos in which I share everything I know about power bi now let's talk about design which can be very tricky however I have five steps for you that you can apply to any report to make it look better and we're going to apply the steps to this report page over here which has all of the visuals that I want to have so we're not going to make changes to the visuals purely the design we're going to change and after we're done with our five steps it will look like there's over here now you see quite a transformation now let's get started with step one which is alignment I often see reports where the visuals are not well aligned or the space is in between the visuals are inconsistent and that gives a very massive impression let's see how we can fix that for our page now I have no visual selected and then I'm going to go to the formatting options so that we have the formatting it's five page canvas background and here we can choose our color I'm going to go for a light gray color that doesn't really matter if you go for light gray light blue whatever you like now you see now there's a little bit of contrast and we can clearly see the borders of the visuals now when we talk about alignment we also have to consider the size of the visuals now for example here in the middle we have three different tables and the width and the height between these three tables is inconsistent especially the one that's on the right versus the other two and here we could go for the same height and same width for each table because none of them is really much bigger than the other all right now which width and height are we going to choose now let's start with the width so I'm gonna select all three of the tables and then in the formatting options and then here General then we have the properties now here we have the weft now let's set the width to 500 and then we can give the tables also the same height now let's go for it to 20. and just by giving them the same dimensions it already looks much better now the next thing that we have to look at then is where to position them exactly all right now I want to have a little bit of space here on the left hand side of my report page so let's say that we want to have 140 pixels over there I'm going to take that first table go to formatting and then here and the general properties there we can go to position and here horizontal there on the left hand side I want to have 140 pixels now of course if I have 140 pixels there on the left hand side of my report page I also want to have 140 pixels on the right inside of my report page now if you're good enough then you can just do it in your head however I usually have to use an Excel file like this one over here now here you see I created two rows one for the width of the visuals and the spaces in the second row for the horizontal position so how many pixels from the left hand side now we have the space on the left hand side on the 40 pixels then we have visual one 500 pixels now add the two up 6 and 40. all right so so we have done a space visual 2 space visual 3 and then the space on the right hand side now everything added up well needs to be the same as the canvas wave which is in my case 1920 pixels all right usually you have to play around a little bit with the spaces that you want to have in between visuals and on the left and the right so that everything nicely adds up of course I already pre-calculated this okay so once you notice then you can go back to Power bi and just apply it over there and to do that that second row the horizontal position is very helpful because I know that the space after visual 2 ends there at 1280 so that is where visual 3 starts okay so keep that number in mind then I go back and then I take that third visual go here again to General properties and then I put the position here to 1280. now when you have the most right visual way you want to have it and the last one as well then the middle one or the middle ones well those are very easy to position you just have to select all three in this case and then you go to format and then here underline there we have distribute horizontally and then you will see that if I select the middle one and see where it's positioned then we have 710 pixels to the left which corresponds to my calculation there in my Excel sheet all right so perfect and for the last one we just have to adjust the width of the columns so let me just drag this a little bit to the right so that everything nicely fits and then we can just do exactly the same for all of the other visuals so let me do that quickly now that looks already much more organized however still not mind-blowing so what is the next thing that we can do well you probably notice that here the titles of each visual are very squeezed to the border and that is not great we like to have white space white space around the main Visual and also between the visuals okay now how can we do that well you might think that if you go to a Visual and then you go into the formatting options that you have something like padding or margin however you can live a look but it is not there now another idea that you might have is like what if we put a border around in the same color and then increase the thickness of that border however that also doesn't work because if we go here to General and then have a look here on the effects we have visual border however for that border we cannot determine the width the thickness of that line so that's also not going to be helpful all right so what we could do just for now is put a white shape in the back of a visual in the same color as the background of the visual and create some space around it that way all right now let's have a look at that can be done well I'm gonna gonna go here to insert shapes and I'm just going to go here for a rectangle now this rectangle I want to have here where my visual is so let's make it first as big as the visual well it needs to be you know a little bit bigger I want to have 20 pixels on the right 20 pixels on the left and the same for the height all right so let's go here to General properties and adjust the width and the height so that that is the case so here the width we can increase to 540 and then here for the height we want to have 270 in this case all right and then we have to place it in the back now to push it to the back we can go here to format and then just send it backwards or you can also go over here to view selection and then place that shape all the way at the bottom or at least below the visual all right and then we can reposition it okay so now we have a thick borderline going around it however that is not really what we want we want to create more space not a thick border all right so we just have to adjust the color now to the same color as the background of our visual which is white so select the shape again go over here to style and here we can change the fit fill color to white and for the Border let's turn that one off and there you go now you see now we have white space around the visual compare the visual where we created the batting with the one that's right next to it while that one feels much more cramped because there's no space around it all right so work with white space now of course we can do this for all of the other visuals as well but before we do that let's have a look at the card visuals there at the top as well now if you have a lot of these card visuals there's also every time a space in between and it might be a little bit much so what you could do is also have over here a shape in the background and then Place those cards on it now let me show you what I mean I'm gonna take that shape I'm just gonna copy it and paste it and then put it in the back of our guide now so here we have to make sure that we send that shape a little bit backwards so that it's behind the cards then you see we have just one block with all of the kpi values on top of it instead of having four separate Elements which might feel like a little bit much all right now let's apply this then also to all of the other visuals all right so step one was fixing the dimensions and alignment of a visuals then we have step two which is working with white space and now it's time for step three which is the corners of the visuals now just go to your phone have a look at the apps that you have installed on your phone and you will see that most of the icons are with rounded corners and we are so used to it that it often looks much better and I think that's because it doesn't really break the flow when you look at an application now the same for your power bi reports so usually I don't go for 90 degrees Corners instead of that I run them a little bit all right so let's select the shape that we have at the background of each Visual and then we go here to formatting options and then here under General then effects there we have background and visual border now I'm going to put the background on turn it to White and then over here we have the visual border let's turn that one on as well open it up then here we have rounded Corners now let's put this one to 15 pixels and then here for the color instead of black we just want to have white and of course let's do it quickly for all of the other visuals as well and there you go it straight away looks much more modern and app-like and also doesn't look that you just went with the default options that power bi gave you and doesn't break the flow as much as having the straight Corners all right so now it's time for step number four which is borders and shadows just to elevate these visuals a little bit from the background of the report all right now let's take that first visual again as an example I take the shape and then I go here to general effects and then here we can go to Shadow all right let's open it up and turn it on now a lot of people just stick with the out of the box Shadow which I think is a little bit too strong it's probably a good idea to soften it a little bit now how can you do that first of all we can change the color so here I usually go for a little bit of lighter gray and then we can go to position and go for custom all right now when you change the custom you have a whole bunch of new options that pop up and the one that I want to change first is transparency so over here let's put it to 85 or maybe even 90. and with just a little bit of Shadow not too much we can give the impression that this visual is separated from the background all right now let's apply it to all of the other visuals as well now that starts to look better and better and at this point it's also important to note that we didn't apply any border around the visuals which would I think be a little bit much because we already have the shadow that separates the visual from the background that we have and the border is not really necessary and when something is not really necessary I just leave it out now of course if you're not a fan of Shadows then just go for thin Border Lines however I think it doesn't create that much separation from the background so therefore my preference is always for Shadows just makes it look a little bit more modern now before we go to step number five let's do something about the title because now it has the same white background color with the rounded corners and therefore it Blends in a little bit too much now it's probably a good idea to have it separated now how could we do that well we could just get rid of that background color so let's select it and then go to formatting effects and then turn the background color off all right that's it and then over here we just have to place maybe this on separate rows so maybe we can do something like this performance tracking 22. make this a little bit bigger okay so we could go for this or maybe you just want to have performance tracking on one row like this okay now then we can just resize it and align it and maybe have OVA performance tracking a little bit bigger let's go for 36 and then 22 and then you can play around also with the font maybe you want to have different font or you want to make the number in bold whatever you prefer okay now it's important that we don't have a border line around the text box so let me turn that one off again all right perfect now besides the title let's also do something about the background because this gray is not the most exciting color so let's go again to the formatting options for the page and then canvas background and then over here instead of this game we could go for a different color like blue whatever you like or we can stick to gray but there are different Shades of Gray so if you go into more colors now color that I often go for is 240 to 43 to 47. all right now you see that is a little bit more silver gray so there are different Shades of Gray and I think this one looks a bit more modern at this point we have our visuals nicely organized on the report page we gave it a bit more of a modern look by playing around with Corners in the shadows and now it's time for step number five now when you go to step number five you want to make sure that you're more in the final stages of the report page so you're kind of sure about the visuals that you want to have on there and not that much is going to happen anymore to the layout of the page now what is Step number five well in this step we are going to choose a color theme for our visuals and give it the finishing touches and bring that layout into a background so that we don't have to load every single shape that we place now on this report okay let's start by creating the background what I would usually do to make this process a little bit easier is I take a screenshot of my power bi report so let me do that quickly and then copy that screenshot over to PowerPoint where we can then create the placeholders for all of the visuals and any extra element that we want to add to the design of our report so for example we can go here to insert shape choose the shape that we want to use maybe here the rectangle with around the corners place it over here and then just make it as big as that background of the first visual play around here with the corners and choose the color that you like and you do that for all of the visuals all right now let me do that quickly now here we have the placeholders for all of the visuals that we have on the report page now you see I went for a bit of a different design a darker design in this case now you can also go for lighter design if you like that more however I wanted to go for something different all right now I also added nice gradient Border Lines around it which is stuff that you cannot do in power guy so we have a lot more design options here in PowerPoints than we have in power bi all right so let's see what else we can add now maybe you want to have something flashier then you can also add something like this let's go for Green Let's choose that as our color as our main color for this report and then we have maybe a little bit more of a darker background around it so these aren't all just shapes that are added and if you're not sure if your visual nicely fit on the displays all this well just make sure that you still have it as a picture there okay now you see this is a selection pane if you don't see the selection pane just go to home and then all the way here on the right hand side and the other thing there you can open the selection page all right now let me just unite then that screenshot that we took before and then you can select it from here go to picture format and then add a little bit of transparency to it now maybe a little bit more just like this or this and now you see everything nice and flat on the placeholder so that's good now once you did your check just hide it again leave it in there you never know maybe you need to make some further changes later on now if you're a fan of icons and you want to integrate that in your report instead of doing it in power bi and where every image has to load separately you can also integrate it into the background which I did already to save a bit of time you see I just added three different icons which you can also find here on the insert and then go here to icons okay good so we have a background and once you're happy with it then what then we need to save it as a picture now to do that she's going into file save as and then here instead of saving it as a PowerPoint go to more options change here the type to SVG don't go for PNG just go for SVG because then you can make it as big without losing quality all right so go for SPG save it wherever you want to have it and then if you have more slides then just choose the one that's currently selected just this one all right and then we go back to Power bi when we use it as a background all right so here we're back on a report page let's open the selection pane first so view selection and then all these background shapes that we had before you can delete so let's select them so everywhere where I have shape here I'm going to select it and with everything selected you can hide it if you want to bring it back later or you just delete it because and we don't really need those anymore okay so that is done then let's close that selection Pane and then we can go again to formatting options canvas background and then here we have image now let's choose then that background image that we just created and that looks a little bit weird you see it doesn't nicely fit to the page but we can change that here on the image of it set it to fit make sure that the transparency is to zero and you see that looks much better however the visuals themselves They Don't Really match the theme just yet okay so that's then the next change that you need to do so that everything nicely matches with those colors that you set up here so for example these cards that we have there at the top we can just select them all in one go and then go here to general effects and then here for the background color just choose the same background color that we used in PowerPoint before for the placeholders so let's go to more colors paste that code in there and there you go all right now for the text of course we have to go for a white font so let's go here to visual and then here we have the callout value and change the color to white all right and for the category label we also want to have it in white okay now of course if the whole report is going to be in this layout it probably makes sense to make a lot of the changes first of all here using the themes all right so that you create a theme with those costs that's going to save you lots of time instead of having to do it for each individual visual all right so you could for example just take the current theme and then customize that change here the main colors change also the color of the text you see by default it is now black but we could change that to white as well all right and you make all of those changes so that all of the formatting becomes a little bit easier quicker and more consistent and after doing that for all of the visuals it looks like this here and you see I didn't make that many changes it's just that I changed the white background colors to the background color of the placeholders and then for the font well I made everything white and then here I aligned for example The Columns nicely so that looks a little bit cleaner all right so that's it for the tables and then here for these visuals that I have there at the bottom I often get rid of all of the elements that I don't need for example the access I don't need if I also have data labels so deleting the elements that you don't need create again more space which was step number two and that makes your charts easy to read and makes you focus on what really matters so in five steps we went from a report that looked like this to this all right you see quite a big change of course there are more things that we can do to improve this further however these are five quick ones that make any report look much cleaner very quickly now let me know what your design tips and tricks are share them in the comment section below if you want to look at more design topics then check out these videos over here and I want to thank you for watching and see you in the next video

Channel: How to Power BI

Views: 479,159

Keywords: creating a powerbi report, power bi visualization, power bi report, power bi report design, power bi report upgrade, power bi dashboard, power bi example, power bi visuals, power bi design, power bi report step by step, power bi kpi dashboard, best power bi design, build report, report design in power bi, power bi report layout, power bi design tricks, learn power bi design, power bi desktop, how to power bi, howtopowerbi, power bi, design tricks

Id: v6fP8gyCLLc

Length: 20min 21sec (1221 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 10 2022