Customize look and feel

1. Customize look and feel

Hi, I'm Maarten, the second instructor for this course. You've seen a few ways to make Power BI behave more like an application than a dashboarding tool. In this video, you will continue building an application-like experience.

2. Button states and styles

Each button may be in one of four states. The default state covers cases in which users are not interacting with the button. When a user mouses over a button, we are in the hover state. When a user clicks a button, we are in the press state. Finally, if a button is disabled, that is its own state as well. When we are in a given state, we can control several aspects of how the button appears. For example, we might show different button text or icons based on the state. We cannot alter other elements, such as the visual header or action--those will remain the same regardless of the button's state.

3. Custom tooltips

Another thing we can do to enhance the viewing experience is to create custom tooltips on our reports. A custom tooltip is a Power BI page which appears when you mouse over a certain area on the screen. You will create this tooltip in the exercises for this lesson. There are two types of custom tooltips. The first is this type, which is context-sensitive and can filter based on the moused-over element. The other type is called a header help tooltip and provides information about the report as a whole. These tooltips are not interactive, so you will want to minimize complexity given their small size and lack of interactions.

4. Unicode symbols and emoji

Power BI supports the Unicode standard, including full use of iconography and emoji. These symbols can provide a lot of information in a small amount of space, though come with the risk that new users might not understand them intuitively.

5. Conditional formatting on tables

You can also implement conditional formatting on tables, modifying background and font colors, adding data bars or icons, and even including web URLs based on the values of rows in a table. In this example, we have a data bar representing activity, showing which dates have more activity than others. We also include a filled box icon which represents percentiles for actual amount.

6. Edit interactions

One other way in which we can control behavior on Power BI reports is to use the Edit Interactions feature. This will allow you to control whether a given visual is allowed to filter another visual. For example, selecting a box on our treemap will modify the rows we see in the table because the default behavior is to allow cross-filtering. If we disable filtering from the treemap to the table, we can select items in the treemap without it filtering the table. Note that these are one-way interactions, so selecting an item from the table will still affect the treemap.

7. Edit interactions

Speaking of treemaps, certain visuals like treemaps have an extra option to apply drill-down filters to either the entire page or just the visual. If you set drill-down filters apply just to the visual, then performing a drill-down operation on the treemap will not affect our table. One good use of interactions is to prevent totals cards from updating as a result of users filtering, slicing, or selecting elements.

8. Filter or highlight?

When interacting with charts which fill area, like treemaps or bar charts, we can choose between highlighting and filtering on selection. Here, we see highlighting in action. If we change the interaction to filter, all of the missing sections disappear. Neither behavior is necessarily right or wrong; it will all depend on your use case.

9. Let's practice!

Now that we've seen several techniques for customizing look and feel, let's try these out.

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