- Yooo! Adam Saxton with Guy in a Cube, and in this video, I'm gonna show you how you can
create an information panel in your report, give your
users a little more education. Let's do this. (upbeat music) If you're finding us for the first time, be sure to hit that subscribe button, to stay up to date with all the videos from both Patrick and myself. All right, I did a video on some ideas that you can
do that take your reports to the next level, right? So adding just a little bit of something to help make it more visually appealing. I'm by no means a graphic artist, but these are simple
things that you can do and implement in your reports. You don't have to be a
graphic designer to do it, let's be honest. One of the things I showed in that video, was an info panel that you
can overlay on your report to just give some more education about what's actually going on and
what's available in the report, as opposed to maybe
never stumbling on that really cool feature you implemented. And in the comments of that
video, it was very clear that everyone wanted to see a video on that. So, here we are. Enough of all this talking,
let's head over to my computer and implement this. So we've got a report. The first thing I wanna call out is make sure your report is finished. If you're still tweaking things, don't do this information panel because things are gonna change. So make sure it's finalized,
everything's good. And we're ready to publish it to the service for people to use. Once that's done, what we wanna do first, is grab a screenshot of
the actual final report. So let's go and do that. I'm gonna hit print screen on my keyboard. I'm using Snagit but you can use the snipping
tool that comes with Windows. And I'm sure there's other
tools out there as well. And I'm just gonna be as
close as I can to the corners. It doesn't have to be perfect. And then I'm gonna go grab
that, take a screenshot. Then what we're gonna do
is head over to PowerPoint. Yes, I said PowerPoint. You can use any tool that you want. I actually personally do this
kind of stuff in Photoshop. I've just been using Photoshop
for a very long time. There's free tools out
there, I think Gimp is one. There's other paid tools that aren't as expensive as
Photoshop that you can go after. You can do all sorts of
things to create this. But PowerPoint tends to be
on most people's machines just because of office. And so this is just an easy way that you can go and create this. It doesn't take a lot of
skills or learning curves. It's PowerPoint, right? If you're doing Google slides, you can probably do this
in Google slides as well. I've honestly never used it. So I don't know how you would go about doing some of the things we're gonna show. So we're doing this in PowerPoint. Now that we're here, I'm gonna
copy my image from Snagit, and I'm gonna paste it
into the report page. So you can see, kind of
takes up the full page. By default your page
resolution inside of power BI is gonna be 16:9. PowerPoint also by default is 16:9. So you wanna make sure that those match. If you're doing a custom
resolution inside of power BI, this may get a little funky, and you're gonna have to
tinker with it a lot more. So now that we've got this, we're gonna overlay on top of this. So I'm gonna grab the shape tool, and I'm just gonna make a shape. Once it's there, I wanna make sure it's on
the actual full corners. Should snap into place, that's good. And then we're gonna go format the shape. Let's get it the color that we want. I'm gonna change it to
my Guy in a Cube color. This could be any color that you want. And then what I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna change the transparency. This said it's 80%, so
it's kind of see-through. And now all we need to do is add the info. Let's go ahead and I'm gonna grab just some call-out buttons. So let's do this. I'm gonna put this over
here, let's say click here for more filter options, and we can play around
with the shape too, right? So shape format, let's do a fill of white. Let's do the outline, let's do black, and let's change the text
color to black as well. And we can muck around
with that a little more and tweak it to where we
want to get this to, right? So there we go, and then if you wanted, we could actually add a
shadow to this as well. Just a little something
to help separate it. Bam, there we go. Now we've got our first item. And you can tweak this a little bit more where you want it to be. Once that's done, go ahead and create all the items that you
want on the actual canvas. The next thing we need to do, is get rid of that
background image because obviously we don't want
that as part of the overlay, the data could change. If we go to the select item here, and then choose the selection pane, we can actually choose that picture. If you hide it, you can
make sure that that's it. And then we can either delete
it or you can leave it hidden. I'm just gonna delete it. You can save this out so
that you can change it later. Now here comes the cool part. I'm gonna go ahead and do a
Control A to select everything. And then I'm gonna right click
and say, save as picture. And we're gonna add it here. I'm gonna call it info panel. And now our image is saved. It's really important here that, don't go to the normal PowerPoint and save as image. Make sure you're selecting everything, right click and then Save As, and make sure you select PNG. This is because when you do this, doing the approach of the Control A, and right click Save As image, that will maintain the
transparency of the background. If you do through the
PowerPoint file menu options, it will not be transparent. And that's the thing that we need. So we've got our PNG
file here, that is good. And we want PNG, because that's actually what allows for the transparency. Now we're back in the Power BI report. All we're going to do
is bring in the image, pull that in, and you'll
see here that it is present. We're just gonna make it as big as we can. Because of the way that
PowerPoint does this, you'll see some edges on the side. For what I'm doing, that's not
a big deal, I'm fine with it. Because it still gets across what I need. If you are very particular about that, and you don't want
those edges to be there, then you're gonna have
to do it in some sort of actual editing tool like Photoshop to make sure you're right
up against the edges. This is just the way
that PowerPoint does it. For our purposes and what
we're doing here, it's fine. So now we've got our image
here, now comes the magic. We're gonna show selections and bookmarks. And with the image selected,
I'm going to add a bookmark and I'll open, also gonna name the image. So I know what that is. Make sure you undo the data, because we don't want the
bookmarks to change the visuals. Now I'm gonna hide the info panel, and then I'm gonna add another bookmark called info panel closed. And again, we're going to uncheck data, and then let's just go
update it for good measure. So now I can switch between these. So now I need a mechanism to
actually do the switching. So now we're gonna add a blank button, and we're gonna move it right there. I know it's a little hard to see because all the window panes are open. We're gonna update the items here. We're not gonna have any
texts, no icon, no outline. The fill, we are going to make this color. I'm going to go to more options. Obviously, this can be
the color of your choice. Make sure it aligns with the
actual background itself. And I'm going to change
transparency to 57%. And then on the, on hover, I'm gonna change this
transparency to 100%. So now when I hover over
it, it'll go white, hey. Select the button, and then
we're gonna add an action and then change it to a bookmark. So when I click the button,
it should open the info panel. And so we're gonna say info panel open. So now if I do control
click, there's my panel. The awesome thing about the images, is the images can have actions. So I'm gonna turn on the action here, so when I click on the image, it's going to close the info panel. Let's get rid of these,
get rid of all of it, so we can see it. So now when I hover
over, I can click, bam! And then I can click again, and it's gone. That is bananas. So now I've got this info panel. I started in PowerPoint,
I bring it into power BI, and through the magic of
selection, bookmarks and buttons, I can make the magic happen. It's as easy as that. I don't
want to hand this over to you. What did you think? Let me know in the comments below, if you think this is easy to do. If you think this is hard, let
me know also or let me know what tool you're using using
to create those images. If you liked this video, be sure to hit that big thumbs up button. Smash it, if you so desire. If it's your first time here,
hit that subscribe button. And as always from both
Patrick and myself, thank you so much for
watching, keep being awesome. And we'll see you in the next video.
