Use Power BI

  • 7 minutes

While Power BI has countless features and gives developers a multitude of ways to interact with their data, Power BI empowers you to quickly create stunning reports with a friendly user interface while incorporating a variety of features to make data easy and beautifully accessible. In this unit, you will learn how Power BI makes creating beautiful data presentations easy.

Power BI -- alignment and grouping

Power BI includes formatting and canvas layout features to make building well formatted reports straightforward such as the following:

  • Align visual borders within the canvas.

  • Visuals will "snap" into place when they align.

  • Visuals can also be distributed horizontally and vertically.

Demonstration of Power BI alignment and grouping.

  • Group visuals together.

  • Ctrl + click (or click + lasso) to select multiple items. Then right click and select Group.

  • Lasso and group visuals to align and resize.

Power BI -- Themes

You can change the entire theme right from the ribbon. You can use pre-defined themes or import your own custom theme to quickly change the design of the report.

Demonstration of Power BI pre-defined themes.

Power BI -- Accessibility

Power BI is designed to meet three of the strictest accessibility standards and guidelines to enable more people access to data.

  • Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1)
  • US Section 508 for Governments and Federal Agencies
  • EN 301 549 the Harmonized European Standards for Accessibility requirements

Accessibility Features

  1. Full Screen
    • Reports can be set to fit to the screen, to the page, or to screen width for improved viewing and readability.
    • Full screen mode hides extraneous menus to focus on the report itself.

    [!div class="mx-imgBorder"] Location of view in Full Screen button.

  2. Focus Mode
    • Individual visuals can be expanded to a full screen view using "Focus Mode".
    • Inspect any single dashboard tile or visual for a closer look.

    [!div class="mx-imgBorder"] Location of Focus Mode button on a visual.

  3. Alt Text Property
    • Use the Alt Text property of visuals to provide a description of the visual content.
  4. Tab Order and Keyboard Navigation
    • Manage keyboard accessibility and user workflow.
  5. Screen-Reader Compatibility
  6. High Contract Color View

How to apply Power BI's Accessibility features while creating reports.