The View ribbon options are illustrated in Figure 22-1 and explained in Table 22-1.

The Format ribbon options are illustrated in Figure 22-2 and explained in Table 22-2.

A set of neatly aligned elements on a page will always please an audience. What is more, it literally only takes a couple of seconds to take a set of existing visuals and to present them harmoniously. The following explains what you do:

The selected elements will be aligned along their tops, bottoms, left or right sides, or centered, depending on the choice that you made. The available alignment options are outlined in Table 22-3.

One way to add a final touch that implies “attention to detail” to a dashboard is to make sure that all visuals are neatly distributed horizontally and/or vertically. This will simply guarantee that there is always the same amount of space between each element.

The Power BI Desktop canvas includes a grid (like a sheet of squared paper) that you can use to align visuals and other objects. This can help you create more polished-looking presentations. To align to the grid , simply

Now, whenever you move or resize an object, it will align to the grid or increase/decrease in size by one grid point (or pixel).

A final option that you can apply when placing visuals is to specify their exact position, height, and width. This feature is particularly useful when you want to make a series of visuals the same size. Follow these steps:

Power BI Desktop uses pixels as the unit of placement as it does for the underlying grid.

Adding a text box is so easy that it takes longer to describe than to do, but nonetheless, this is how you do it:

Figure 22-6 shows you a text box a report. Moreover, should you want to modify a text, it is as easy as clicking inside the text box and altering the existing text just as you would in, say, PowerPoint.

Text boxes are a Power BI Desktop visualization like any other, and consequently, they can be moved and resized just as if they were a table or a chart. So all you have to do to move a title is to

Alternatively, you can select the text box and then place the mouse pointer over the edges of the text box (but not on the corner or side handles) and drag the text box to a new position.

A text box can be formatted specifically so that you can give it the weight and power that you want. Even though this is completely intuitive, for the sake of completeness here is a short example of what you can do:

The formatting options for text boxes are explained in Table 22-5.

To add a hyperlink:

To remove a hyperlink that you have already added:

If you prefer, you can always simply remove the text that is the link.

If you want to delete a text box, then be sure to

An alternative way to delete a text box is to select the text box and press the Delete key.

There are multitudes of image formats. Power BI Desktop accepts all of the following industry-standard image types:

You may still want to add completely free-form floating images to a report. However, before getting carried away with all that can be done with images, remember that Power BI Desktop is not designed as a high-end presentation package. If anything, it is there to help you analyze and present information quickly and cleanly. Inevitably, you will find that there are things that you cannot do in Power BI Desktop that you are used to doing in, say, PowerPoint. Consequently, there are many presentation tricks and techniques that you may be tempted to achieve in Power BI Desktop using images to get similar results. Indeed, you can achieve many things in a Power BI Desktop report by adding images. Yet the question that you must ask yourself is “Am I adding value to my report?” I am a firm believer that less is more in a good presentation. Consequently, although I will show you a few tricks using images, many of them go against the grain of fast and efficient Power BI Desktop report creation and can involve considerable adjustment whenever the data in a visualization changes. So I advise you not to go overboard using images to enhance your presentations unless it is really necessary.

Despite these caveats, let’s add a floating, independent image to a Power BI Desktop report. In this example it is a company logo—that of Brilliant British Cars, the company whose metrics we are analyzing throughout the course of this book.

Adding an image is really simple. All you have to do is

To remove an image, all you have to do is

An alternative way to delete an image is to select the image and press the Delete key. The selected image will disappear from the report.

An image is just like any other visual in a Power BI Desktop dashboard in that any of these elements can be moved and resized in exactly the same way. Simply do the following:

Once you have added an image, it can be tweaked to some extent in Power BI Desktop. The following are the parameters that you can modify:

All of these modifications except for the first are common to most of the visualizations in Power BI Desktop. Indeed, you have come across some of them several times already. Consequently, I will not waste your time repeating things that you already know, or can find elsewhere in this book.

Image scaling is completely new, however. Here is how you can alter the way that an image is altered if you resize it:

The image will adjust to take up all the available space in the image placeholder.

The three available image scaling options are explained in Table 22-6.

One major, and frequently very striking, use of images is as a background to a report—and possibly even to a whole series of reports. So, let’s take a look at how to use images for report backgrounds.

The limits of what images can do to a report are only those of your imagination, so it is impossible to give a comprehensive list of suggestions. Nonetheless, the following are a few uses that I have found for free-form images:

You can tweak the following aspects of shapes:

As it is only the first three that are new as far as formatting visuals is concerned, let’s see them in action.

To remove a shape, all you have to do is

An alternative way to delete a shape is to select the shape and press the Delete key. The selected shape will disappear from the report.

If you are adding the final decorative (and hopefully also illustrative touches) to a dashboard, you might want to make a series of shapes all look identical. After all, you never want a dashboard to look like a patchwork quilt. A trusted tool from MS Office is available to help you rationalize dashboards in this way-the Format Painter.

As a report gets more complex, you will inevitably need to arrange the elements that it contains not only side by side, but also one on top of the other. Power BI Desktop lets you do this simply and efficiently.

As an example of this, let’s create a chart with another chart superposed on it:

Your composite chart should look like Figure 22-13. Bringing the donut chart to the front means that the gridlines for the column chart are now under the donut chart.

This technique is particularly useful when you are adding independent images as was described in the previous section. It is also handy when you are combining elements such as images and text boxes, as you will see in the next section.

This is a perfectly ordinary Power BI Desktop report. For argument’s sake, let me specify it like this:

This page will have a couple of specific tweaks added-as you will see. However, it must be designed to show data that is relevant to the single element that you want it to display. In this example that means information about a make of vehicle.

You can now use your drillthrough report.

The Make Details report will be displayed and will filter the data to display the make of the row or data point that you right-clicked.

Power BI Desktop created a back button automatically on the drill-through report (the “destination” report page). However, you do not have to use this button if you do not want to. In fact, any shape or image can become a back button. Here is how you set this: