Best Practices
Introduction
This paper provides best practices for designing reports in Power BI. Starting with planning, it discusses principles of design that you can apply to your reports and to the pages and individual visuals that make up that report. Many of these best practices apply to dashboard design as well.
We hope this paper will be a jumping-off point for you and that you’ll apply what you learn to your own reports and visualizations and that you’ll continue the conversation on community.powerbi.com. BI report design and visualization usage is a hot topic right now and there are many thought leaders, bloggers, and websites that look at this topic in breadth and depth (we’ve listed a few at the end).
Note:
The recommendations made in this white paper are guidelines for you to apply when and where it makes sense. For every principle we describe below, there are usually valid reasons to “break the rule.”
We are overwhelmed by information, not because there is too much, but because we don't know how to tame it. -- Stephen Few
A look at the landscape and terminology
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Figure 36: Set data point colors
Note:
Power BI applies a default theme to your report visuals. The theme colors have been chosen to provide variety and contrast. To divert from the default theme palette, select Custom color.
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Import data into your Power BI Desktop report, or configure a DirectQuery connection.
Note:
You cannot define roles within Power BI Desktop for Analysis Services live connections. You will need to do that within the Analysis Services model.
Select the Modeling tab.
Select Manage Roles.
Select Create.
Provide a name for the role.
Select the table that you want to apply a DAX rule.
Enter the DAX expressions. This expression should return a true or false. For example: [Entity ID] = “Value”.
Note:
You can use username() within this expression. Be aware that username() will have the format of DOMAIN\username within Power BI Desktop. Within the Power BI service, it will be in the format of the user's UPN. Alternatively, you can use userprincipalname() which will always return the user in the format of their user principal name.
After you have created the DAX expression, you can select the check above the expression box to validate the expression.
Select Save.
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