The default formatting Power BI applies to columns and measures should also be revised to a corporate standard or a format applicable to the column or measure. For example, the default full date format of 'Friday July 1, 2011' can be revised to the more compact (mm/dd/yyyy) format of 7/1/2011. Likewise, the currency format for measures calculating financial data can be revised to display two decimal places and the thousands separator can be added to numeric measures.

Business users and report developers do not have the ability to change column and measure formatting when connecting to the published dataset from Power BI or Excel. Therefore, it's important to choose widely accepted data formats and formats that lend themselves to intuitive data visualizations.