1. Create a custom theme
Welcome back! My name is Jess, and I'll be your instructor for the rest of the course.
Themes are an important part of designing Power BI reports.
2. What are themes?
What is a theme? Great question. A theme is a standard set of colors and formatting that can be applied to your entire Power BI report. Themes give you the ability to change report-level design settings.
The purpose of a theme is to enable you to have a consistent design across your report without having to edit each item individually. It can be useful when trying to have your reports comply with branding guidelines or provide a more consistent format across your reporting suite.
For example, you can change the colors Power BI uses for charts, switch to different fonts, or change font sizes.
Power BI comes with a set of default themes, including dark themes, light themes, and themes that are easy to use for people with color vision deficiency. Additionally, you can create custom themes.
3. Themes are editable
In addition to loading up Microsoft themes, you can customize themes. It turns out that these theme files are simply JSON.
There are dozens of things you can modify in a theme. You can choose to modify all of these things or specific items.
For example, here is the theme we have used so far for our exercises. We changed the font size of all text to 15 points, making it easier for people to read.
4. Themes Gallery
The Power BI Themes Gallery is a community-driven portal where you can review themes others have created.
More than that, you may also download these themes and use them in your reports.
5. Methods for editing themes
The easiest method for editing themes is to use the built-in theme customizer in Power BI. You can access this from the Themes drop-down menu in the View ribbon.
The second technique you can use is to modify JSON files directly. This is useful because there are some settings you cannot change within Power BI Desktop's theme customizer.
There are also third-party tools available for editing themes.
6. What can we edit?
The sheer variety of things you can edit can be staggering. A community-driven GitHub repository includes examples of each built-in visual and one global template.
An example of how customizable things are is a section from the ribbon chart template. You can keep all of these options the same, but they are available.
7. Importing and exporting themes
You can also import and export themes using the Themes drop-down menu. Select "Browse for themes" to import a theme from your local disk and "Save current theme" to export it as JSON. Once you have exported a theme, you can modify the JSON directly.
8. Theme guidance
Here are a few pieces of advice around themes. First, make sure that font sizes are large enough for users to see everything. We default to 15-point font sizes.
Be sure that users can distinguish between your colors. Check to ensure that your color combinations are distinguishable for people with various forms of color vision deficiency.
Power BI themes only need eight colors, so stick to that number of colors.
The first color in your theme is the primary color. It will be the default first color in various charts, the default color for shapes, and more.
If you are using a light background, be sure to use vivid, saturated colors. By contrast, dark themes work best with lighter tones like pastels. The idea is to maximize the contrast between colors and the background.
Finally, the filter pane should have a color different from your background, though it should not be so bright that it distracts your users.
9. Let's practice!
Let's test your newly acquired knowledge of themes.