PL-300 – Section 3: Part 1 Level 2: Formatting our first visualization

17. The New Format Pane

Hello and welcome to section three of this course. And we’re going to start looking at formatting our visualisations. Before we do, there is a change that Microsoft have done. They introduced this in November, 2021, and it’s called the New Format Pane. And they switched it on for all users when they updated from February, 2022. So you’ll probably see the New Format Pane like this.

Now, if you want to go back to the older version you can do so by going to File, Options and Settings, Options and then on the left hand side scrolling down to preview features.

So, there we have the new New Format Pane, which is probably on for you. So, if we quickly explore it, if I click on a visualisation you can see that it now appears, and it is divided into two sections, Visual and General. Basically, the General items here are ones which will appear for all visualisations, and the Visual will be visual specific. So, you may see some different things, for instance, for a pie chart.

Another thing that you notice is that when you’re formatting all of these different options for visualisations disappear. So, you won’t be able to create a new visualisation until you go back to add data to your visual.

Now, just like the older version, these are grouped together. Unlike the older version, however, there are groups within groups. So, within the Values, for instance, we have Values and Border. Within Grid, we’ve got Horizontal gridlines, Vertical gridlines, Border, and Options. Now, there is a dot-dot-dot (…) next to the Formatting Pane. And if you click that, you can see, you can expand all categories. So that gives you a complete list for this visualisation, but do remember there are two tabs as well. You can collapse all categories, and if you’ve done something that you don’t want to and want to get back to where you were originally, well, you can press the Undo button but you can also Reset all settings to default.

Now, some people will still have the older Format Pane, I’m thinking especially of corporate users who only update every so often. So, when we’re talking about the formatting, what I’ll do is, I will get rid of this Fields pane on the right side, and I will replace it with what you could see under the old Formatting Pane. So, for most of you, you can ignore what’s going on on the right hand side and concentrate instead on this Formatting Pane, the new version that you can see here. So, thank you very much for watching and now let’s keep learning.

18. Formatting Font and Font Size

In the previous video, we created our first visualisation but it doesn’t actually look that good. So what we’re going to do is format it. We’re going to change things like the colour and the size and other things.

Now, in this Visualisations pane, we have got three buttons here – Fields, Format, and Analytics. So they’re buttons or icons. They may look slightly different in your version, for instance. If you have an older version of Power BI, then this middle paintbrush looks a bit like a pen, for example.

So, while this first icon, Fields, is everything you need to set up your initial visualisation, this second one, Format actually makes it looks nice. So, let’s click into Format and you can see we have got several categories of formatting. I’m just going to start off with the third one – Grid. So, if I expand that by just clicking on it, we can see that there are several different types of properties of formatting that you can do. So, whether it’s a vertical grid and you’ll notice that this is a toggle, it’s an on/off switch. So, to switch it on, you just click onto it. And this effect is fairly minimal, at this stage anyway. You see a dotted line appear vertically just down there.

Similarly, horizontal grid. It adds, or in this case, subtracts little lines. But we can hardly see the lines. So what I’m going to do is scroll down until here. Text size. And I’m going to expand. And this makes it actually readable. So, now when I do things like the vertical grid, it’s much more likely that you can actually read it.

Now, in some applications, like Excel, if there is something that you can’t do, it is greyed out. For instance, I can’t clear a filter because I haven’t actually engaged, applied a filter to start with.

In Power BI, if there’s something you can’t do, it’s simply not shown. So, for instance, this vertical grid is currently turned off. If I turn this on, an extra option appears between the vertical grid and the horizontal grid and you can see that you can change the colour of this line. So, maybe, if I make it red and make it much more stand out and increase the thickness, you can see what this particular thing, the vertical grid, will do. So, if something is switched off, it may be hiding quite a number of options.

So, here we can add thickness to the horizontal grid between the lines and you can increase the Row padding. So, if it’s too concertinaed, if it’s too inwards, then you can just expand it.

You’ve got an outline colour. So, you can see that separates the totals from the data and the data from the headings. And again, an outline weight, so how much weight do you want this line? How thick do you want the line?

And at the bottom of each of these little sections, there is a Revert to default. So, if you made changes, don’t like them, and you want to go back all the way to where the computer started, click Revert to default. If you just want to go back one step, then you can always use the Undo which is up here in the ribbon at the top. So, that will just undo a step or so. Unlike Excel, you can’t get a list of all of the things that you can undo and redo. It’s just these little icons that you have to repeatedly click if you want to go back several steps.

Now, part of the reason for showing you the Grid first is because the Column headers, the Values and the Totals are subdivisions of the Grid. So, the Grid affects all three of these whereas if you want it just to affect one of them, then you would go into, say, the Column headers, you go into the Column headers and change. So, suppose I wanted the Column headers to have size 16, that can be done without affecting the rest of the Grid.

19. Formatting Colors

Now you’ll see various options, for instance, there’s the Font colour. So, we have an array of 60 different colours and these are Theme colours and they are colours that are given by the theme that is either the default theme or a theme that you have applied. And so, in this case, we have a sort of red colour here and then we have various colours which are offsets of this. So, 20% lighter, 40% lighter, alternatively 25% darker, 50% darker. So, you can select which particular colour relating to the theme you want.

Alternatively, you can click on Custom colour, and Custom colour gives you access to the wheel.

Now, let me explain what the wheel is. Colours are made up of red, green and blue and you can see this particular location all the way over here is the most red. Over here is the most blue and over here is the most green. So, it’s how much intensity, how much of red, green and blue do you add that makes up all of the different colours. So, you can see that if they all have the same colour to the equal intensity, then you’re going to get a white colour. So, if you wanted red and then started adding blue, while this is the maximum amount of red over here and then we start adding blue by going around the colour wheel.

Similarly, if you started with red and added green, that gives us the maximum amount of green. That’s the maximum amount of blue with red. And then if you go any further, we start subtracting red from it. So, basically, find a colour that you want on this wheel. It’s got all 16 million colours that your Excel would have. And in fact, the human eye can’t even see 16 million colours. So, find what colour you want, click on it and you’ll see, in this case, the Column headers have been coloured this particular colour. You can similarly colour background colours the same way. So, maybe a nice yellow.

Now, if you are familiar with colour wheels, then you’ll have noticed at the bottom, we’ve got this hexadecimal (six) letters or numbers followed by an amount of red – a number from zero to 256 – and then green, and then blue. So, you can adjust it in hexadecimal on the left-hand side or in the New Format Pane. You can also adjust the individual figures from zero to 255 on the left-hand side, red, and then green, and then blue.

Looking at other features, we have the opportunity to change the font. So you can see the font family. So, that is the major font. So, maybe I wanted Comic Sans for this and you can see what text size you want, what alignment you want, whether it’s left-aligned, centred, you can see the region name changing and right-aligned, and whether there is Word wrap on or not. And that means that if there is insufficient text, I mean insufficient room for the text in the column, then it can go onto a second line.

And you’ll see we have identical or fairly identical options for the Values and the Totals.

Now, if you want not to format the entirety of this table, but just various aspects, like for instance, the RegionName, then what you can do is go down to field Formatting and you can select which field, which column you want to format. So, I might want to have the RegionName in red with a sort of orange background. You can change the alignment. You can have this font or style applied to the header or not, and Apply to total affects whether the total is similarly coloured.

So, in this video, we’ve had a look at changing the font, changing the font size and changing the colours of visualisations. So, you can see that the Format icon here. It is divided into lots of different categories. Some affect more things than others. The Grid affects the entire visualisation, but you can narrow it down and affect all of the Values or you can narrow it down further and affect just the Field formatting. In the next video, we’ll have a look at some different types of formatting you can do to this visualisation.