Page Comparison

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In Power BI, a report can have one or more report pages and all the pages together are collectively referred to as the report. The basic elements of the report are visuals (aka visualizations), standalone images, and text boxes. From the individual data points, to the report elements, to the report page itself, there are innumerable formatting options.

We’ll start at the report planning stage, continue on to basic report design principles, then discuss visual design principles, and finish with a discussion of best practices for individual visual types.

In-depth guidance and instructions for creating and using Power BI reports is available at Microsoft > Learn.

Report Focus: Requirements

Creating a report starts In-depth guidance and instructions for creating and using Power BI reports is available at Microsoft > Learn.

Report Focus: Requirements

Creating a report starts before you build your first visual because a good report needs planning. Know what data you have to work with and write down the requirements for the report. Ask yourself “What is the business need, how is this data going to be used, and by whom?” A key question is “what decisions does the reader want to be able to make based on this report?”

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Once you’ve identified the business need, the customers, and the metrics you’d like to include, the next step is to pick the right visuals to tell the story and present those visuals in the most-effective way possible. That covers a lot of ground, and we’ll start with some basic principles of report design.

Principles of Report Design

A report page has limited space and one of the hardest things is to fit all the elements you want into that space – and still have that information be easily understood. And don’t underplay the value of “pretty.” The key is to find the balance between pretty and useful.

Let’s take a look at layout, clarity, and aesthetics.

Layout - Report Canvas

The report canvas has a

Layout - Report Canvas

The report canvas has a finite amount of space. If you can’t fit all the elements on a single report page, break the report up into pages. A report page can be tailored to a specific audience (e.g., HR, IT, Sales, SLT), or to a specific business question (e.g., How are defects impacting our downtime?, What is our Marketing campaign’s impact on Sentiment?) or as a progressive story (e.g. first page as overview or attention-grabbing “hook”, 2nd page continues the data story, 3rd page dives deeper into the story, etc.). If your entire report fits on a single page, great. If it doesn’t, create separate report pages that logically chunk the content. And don’t forget to give the pages meaningful and helpful names.

Think about filling an art gallery. You wouldn’t put 50 pieces of artwork into a small room, fill it with chairs and paint each wall a different color. As the curator, you’d choose just pieces that have a common theme, lay them out around the room with plenty of space for visitors to move and think, and place informational cards that describes what they’re looking at. And there’s There is a reason most modern galleries have plain walls! For this article, we’ll start with a report example that needs a lot of work. As we apply our best practices and principles of design, our report will improve.

Alignment, order, and proximity

Alignment, order, and proximity

The layout of your report elements impacts comprehension and guides the reader through the report page. How you place and position elements tells a story. The story might be “start here and then look here” or “these 3 elements are related to each other.”

• In most cultures, people scan from left to right and top to bottom. Position the most important element in the top left corner of your report. And organize the rest of the visuals in a way that leads to logical navigation and comprehension of the information.
• Position elements that require the reader to make a choice to the left of the visualizations the choice will impact: like slicers, for example.
• Position related elements close to each other; proximity implies the elements are related.
• Another way to convey relationships is to add a border or color background around related elements. Conversely, add a divider to distinguish between different sections of a report.
• Use white space to visually chunk sections of the report page.
• Fill the report page. If you find that you have a lot of extra white space, make your visualizations larger or make the canvas smaller.
• Be intentional with sizing your report elements. Don’t let space availability dictate the size of a visualization.
• Make important elements larger than the others or add a visual element like an arrow to draw attention.
• Align the elements on the report page, either symmetrically or intentionally asymmetrically.

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Tell a

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Alignment

Alignment doesn’t mean that that the different components need to be the same size or that you must have the same number of components on each row of the report. It just means that there is a structure to the page that aids in navigation and readability. Power BI includes tools to help you align your visuals. In Power BI Desktop, with multiple visuals selected, you can use the Align and Distribute options on the Visuals ribbon tab to match up the position of visuals.

In Power BI online and Power BI Desktop, you also have precise control over the size and position of visuals through the General tab on the formatting pane for all visuals:

Fit to the space

Make the best use of the space you have. If you know how the report will be viewed/displayed, design with that in mind. Reduce empty space to fill the canvas. Do all you can to eliminate the need for scroll-bar on individual visuals. Fill the space without making the visuals seem cramped.

Adjust the page size

By reducing the page size, individual elements become larger relative to the overall page. Do this by deselecting any visuals on the page and using the Page Size tab in the formatting pane.  Will your report be viewed 4:3, 16:9 or another ratio? On small screens or huge screens? Or on all possible screen ratios and sizes? Design with this in mind.

Reduce clutter

A cluttered report page will be hard to understand at-a-glance and may be so overwhelming that readers won’t even try. Get rid of all report elements that aren’t necessary. Don’t add bells-and-whistles that don’t help comprehension or navigation. Your report page needs to convey the information as clearly and quickly and cohesively as it can.

The clutter you remove will increase the white space on your report page and give you more real estate for applying the best practices we learned about above in the “Alignment, order, and proximity” section.

Here our example is already looking better. We’ve removed lots of clutter and added shapes to group elements together. The background image is gone, the unnecessary arrow shape and text box are gone, one visual has been moved to another page in the report, etc. We’ve also lengthened the page size to increase white (yellow?) space.

Tell a story at a glance

The overall test should be that somebody without any prior knowledge can quickly understand the report without any explanation from anybody. With a quick glance, readers should be able to quickly see what the page is about and what each chart/table is about.

When readers look at your report, their eyes should be drawn to the element you want them to look at first and their eyes will then continue left-right-top-down. Change this behavior by adding visual cues like text box labels, shapes, borders, size, and color.

Much of what we would consider aesthetics has already been discussed above: things like alignment, color, font choices, clutter. But there are a few more best practices for report design worth discussing and these deal with the overall appearance of the report.

Remember that the function of your report is to meet a business need; not to be pretty. But some level of beauty is required, especially when it comes to first impressions. Nashville consultant Tony Bodoh explains "Emotion fires a half-second before logic can kick in." Readers will first react at an emotional level to your report page, before they take more time to dig deeper. If your page looks disorganized, confusing, unprofessional…your reader may never discover the powerful story it tells.

Concentrate on creating a common theme or look for your report, and apply it to all pages of the report; using standalone images and other graphics to support and not detract from the real story; and applying all the best practices we discussed up to this point in the article.

Text boxes

Sometimes the titles on visualizations aren’t enough to tell the story. Add text boxes to communicate with the people viewing your reports. Text boxes can describe the report page, a grouping of visuals, or describe an individual visual. They can explain results or better-define a visual, components in the visual, or relationships between visuals. Text boxes can be used to draw attention based on different criteria called out in the text box.

In Power BI service, from the top menubar, select Text Box. (In Power BI Desktop, select Text Box from the Insert area of the ribbon.)  Type in the empty box and then use the controls at the bottom to set font face, size, alignment, and more. Use the handles to resize the box, but don’t overdo it! Too much text on a report is distracting and detracting from the visuals. If you find that your report page requires a ton of text to make it understandable, then start over. Can you pick a different visual that tells a better story on its own? Can you tweak the visual’s native titles to make it more intelligible?

Text

Create a text style guide and apply it to all pages of your report. Pick just a few font faces, text sizes, and colors. Apply this style guide to not only textual elements but to the font choices you make within your visualizations (see Titles and labels that are part of the visualizations, below). Set rules for when you’ll use bold, italics, increased font size, certain colors, and more. Try to avoid using all capitalization or underlining.

Shapes

Shapes too can aid navigation and comprehension. Use shapes to group related information together, highlight important data, and use arrows to direct the eye. Shapes help readers understand where to start and how to interpret your report. In design terms, this is often referred to as contrast. Our text style guide calls for no backgrounds, black titles, legends, and labels and that was applied to all visuals on the page, where possible (the Combo chart axes and labels are not editable). Additionally: - Cards: Category label set to Off, Title turned On and set to 12pt black centered. - Visual titles: if turned On, set to 12pt and left-aligned. - Slicers: Header set to Off, Title turned On. Leave Items > Text grey and 10pt. - Scatter and column charts: black font for X and Y axes and X and Y axes titles, if used.

Color

Use color for consistency. We’ll talk more about color in Principles of visual design, below. But here we’re referring to being deliberate in your selection of color so that it doesn’t detract from your readers being able to quickly understand your report. Too many bright colors barrage the senses. This section is more what not to do with color.

Backgrounds

When setting backgrounds for report pages, choose colors that don’t overshadow the report, clash with other colors on the page, or generally hurt the eyes. Realize that some colors have inherent meaning. For example, in the US, red in a report is typically interpreted as “bad”. You are not creating a work of art, but a functional report. Choose a color that improves the readability and prominence of the report elements.

A study on the use of color and visualizations within Web pages found that higher contrast between colors increases the speed of comprehension (The effect of text and background color on visual search of Web pages** and **Determining Users’ Perception of Web Page Visual Complexity and Aesthetic Characteristics.)

Page title

When we changed the background to black, our title disappeared because the text box field only allows black font. To fix this, add a text box title instead. With the text box selected, erase the text and in the Visualizations tab, select Title and turn it On. Select the arrow to expand the Title options, type Summer Olympic Games into the Title Text field and select white Font color.

Cards

For the card visuals, open the formatting pane (paint roller icon) and turn Background On. Select white with a transparency of 0%. Then turn Title On, select Font color white and Background color black.

Slicers

Up to this point the two slicers had different formatting, which doesn't make design sense. For both slicers, change the background color to aqua. Aqua is a good choice because it is part of the page’s color palette – you can see it in the filled map, tree map, and column chart.

Rectangle shape

The rectangle too has disappeared into the black background. To fix this, select the shape and in the Format shape pane, turn Background On.

Column charts, bubble chart, filled map, and tree map

Add a white background to the remaining visuals on the report page. From the formatting pane, expand the Line option and set the Line Color to white and Weight to 3. 

Summary - Principles of Visual Design

We’ve looked at the principles of report design; how to organize the report elements in a way that makes the report easy to quickly grasp. Now we’ll look at design principles for visuals themselves. And, in the next section, we’ll dig down into individual visuals and discuss best practices for some of the more commonly-used types.

In this section, we’re going to leave our example report page alone for a while and look at other examples. After we’ve gone through the principles of visual design, we’ll return to our example report page and apply what we’ve learned (with step-by-step instructions).

Planning – Choose the Right Visualization

Just as it’s important to plan out your report before you start building, each visual also requires planning. Ask yourself “what story am I trying to tell with this visual?” And then figure out which visual type will tell the story best. You could show progress through a sales cycle as a bar chart but wouldn’t a waterfall or funnel chart tell it better? For help with this, read the last section of this paper “Visual types and best practices” which describes best practices for some of the more-common types. Don’t be surprised if the first visual type you pick doesn’t end up being your best option. Try more than one visual type to see which one makes the point best.

Understand the difference between categorical and quantitative data and know which visual types work best with what type of data. Quantitative data is often referred to as measures and it’s typically numeric. Categorical data is often referred to as dimensions and can be classified. This is discussed in more depth in “Choose the right measure”, below.

Avoid the temptation to use fancy or more-complex visual types just to make your report look more impressive. What you want is the most-simple option for conveying your story. Horizontal bar charts and simple line charts can convey information quickly. They are familiar and comfortable and most readers can interpret them easily. An added advantage is that most people read left-to-right and top-to-bottom and these two chart types can therefore be scanned and comprehended quickly.

Does your visual require scrolling to tell the story? Avoid scrolling if you can. Try applying filters and making use of hierarchies/drilldown, and if those don’t eliminate the scrollbar, consider choosing a different visual type. If you can’t escape scrolling, horizontal scrolling is tolerated better than vertical scrolling.

Even when you choose the absolutely-best visual for the story, you might still need help telling the story. That’s where labels, titles, menus, color, and size come in. We’ll discuss these design elements later in the section titled “Design elements”.

Choose the Right Measure

Is the story your visual telling compelling? Does it matter? Don’t build visuals for the sake of building visuals. Maybe you thought the data would tell an interesting story, but it doesn’t. Don’t be afraid to start over and look for a more-interesting story. Or, maybe the story is there but it needs to be measured in a different way.

For example, say you want to measure the success of your sales managers. What measure would you use to do this? Would you measure that best by looking at total sales or total profit, growth over previous year or performance against a target goal? Salesperson Sally might have the largest profit, and if you showed total profit by salesperson in a bar chart, she would look like a rockstar compared to the other salespeople. But if Sally has a high cost of sales (travel expenses, shipping costs, manufacturing costs, etc.), simply looking at sales doesn’t tell the best story.

Reflect reality/don’t distort reality

It’s possible to build a visual that distorts the truth. There’s a website where data enthusiasts share “bad” visuals. And the common theme in the comments is disappointment in the company that created and distributed that visual. It sends the message that they can’t be trusted. Create visuals that don’t intentionally distort reality and that aren’t manipulated to tell the story you want them to tell.

Readers expect and often assume the X axis is starting at zero. If you decide to not start at zero, do so in a way that doesn’t distort the results and consider adding a visual cue or text box to point out the deviation from the norm.

Design elements

Once you’ve selected a type and measure and created the visual, it’s time to fine-tune the display for maximum effectiveness. This section covers: - Layout, space, and size - Text elements: labels, annotations, menus, titles - Sorting - Visual interaction - Color

Tweaking visuals for best use of space

If you’re trying to fit multiple charts into a report, maximizing your data-ink ratio will help make the story in your data stand out. Edward Tufte coined ‘data-ink’ ratio: the goal is remove as many marks from a chart as possible without impairing a reader’s ability to interpret the data.

By removing the chart titles and turning on individual axis labels we remove some ink and have better use of the overall space. We can remove the axis labels for the top two charts to further reduce ink and use more of the space for data.

If there were particular time periods that you wanted to call out, you could draw lines or rectangles behind all the charts to help draw the eye up and down to aid comparisons.

To turn axis titles on and off

Select the visual to make it active and open the Formatting pane. Expand the options for the X-axis or Y-axis and drag the slider for Title on or off.

To turn axis labels on and off

Select the visual to make it active and open the Formatting pane. Next to X-Axis and Y-Axis are sliders. Drag the slider to turn axis labels on or off.

To remove visual titles

Select the visual to make it active and open the Formatting pane. Set the slider for Title to Off.

Consider how your readers will be viewing the report and ensure your visuals and text are large enough and dark enough to be read. If you have a proportionally-larger visual on the page, readers may assume it’s the most important. Put enough space between the visuals that your report doesn’t look cluttered and confusing. Align your visuals to help direct the eyes of your readers.

To resize a visual

Select the visual to make it active. Grab and drag one of the handles to adjust the size.

To move a visual

Select the visual to make it active. Select and hold the gripper bar at the top middle of the visual and drag the visual to its new location.

Titles and labels that are part of the visualizations

Ensure titles and labels are readable and self-explanatory. Text in titles and labels must be an optimal size with colors that stand out (such as black instead of the default grey). Remember our style guide (see "Text" above)? Limit the number of colors and sizes -- too many different font sizes and colors make the page look busy and confusing. Consider using the same font color and size for the title of all visuals on a report page and choose the same alignment for all titles on a report page.

The formatting pane

For each of the formatting adjustments listed below, select the paint roller icon to open the Formatting pane. Select the visual element to adjust and make sure it is set to On. Examples of visual elements are: X-Axis, Y-Axis, Title, Data labels, and Legend. The example below shows the Title element.

Set the text size

Text size can be adjusted for titles and data labels, but not for X or Y axes or legends. For data labels specifically, play with the Display units and number of Decimal Places until you find the optimal level of detail for displaying on your report.

Set the text alignment

The choices for title alignment are left, right, and center. Choose one and apply that same setting to all visuals on the page.

Set the text position

Text position can be adjusted for some Y axes and for the legend. Whichever you choose, do the same for the other Y axes and any other legend on the page.

Set the title and label length

Adjust the length of titles, axes titles, data labels, and legends. If you decide to display any of these elements, adjusting the length (along with text size) ensures that nothing is truncated. For Title and Legend, the setting is Title Text and this is where you type in the actual title that will appear on the visual. For X-Axis and Y-Axis, the setting is Style and you select from a drop-down. For Data labels, the settings are Display and Decimal. Use the Display dropdown to select the units of measurement: millions, thousands, none, auto, etc. Use the Decimal field to tell Power BI how many decimal places to display.

Set the text color

Text color can be adjusted for titles, axes, and data labels.

Titles and labels that are not part of the visualizations

Earlier in this paper we discussed adding text boxes to report pages. Sometimes the titles on visualizations aren’t enough to tell the story. Add text boxes to communicate additional information to the readers of your reports.
To keep your report page from looking too confusing or too busy, be consistent in your use of text box fonts, sizes, colors, and alignment. To make an adjustment to the text in a text box, select the text box to reveal the formatting menu.

Sorting

A really simple opportunity to provide faster insight is to set the sorting of visuals. For example, sorting bar charts in descending or ascending order based on the value in the bars enables you to quickly show significant incremental information without using more real estate.

To sort a chart, select the ellipses (…) in the top right of the chart, select Sort and choose the field you want to sort by and the direction. For more information, see Change how a visual is sorted.

Chart interaction and interplay

One of the most compelling feature of Power BI is the ability to edit the way charts interact with each other. By default, charts are cross-highlighted: when you select a data point, the related data of other charts light up and the unrelated data dims. You can override this behavior to use any chart as a true filter which saves you real estate on your page. To do this, select Visual Interactions from the menu-bar.

Then, for each visual on the page, decide whether you want the selected visual to filter, highlight, or do nothing. Not all visuals can be highlighted, and for those the highlight control won't be available. For more information, see Visual interactions in Power BI.

The use of color in visuals

Earlier in this paper we talked about the importance of having a plan for how you’re going to use color across a report. This section will have some overlap but primarily applies to how you use color in individual visuals. And the same principles apply: use color to tie the report together, add emphasis to important data, and to improve the reader’s comprehension of the visual. Too many different colors is distracting and makes it difficult for the reader to know where to look. Don’t sacrifice comprehension for beauty. Only add color if it improves comprehension.

This topic is broken down to cover: 1. Data color 2. Data label color 3. Color for categorical values 4. Color for numerical values

Use colors to highlight interesting data

The simplest way to use color is by changing one or more data point’s color to call attention to it. You can change data point colors from the Data colors tab in the formatting pane. To customize each data point individually, make sure Show all is set to On. 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. In Power BI Desktop, you can even highlight outliers or a section of a line by using a second series:

Colors for labels and titles

As you explore all the formatting options available to you, you’ll find many different places to add color to titles and legends. For example, you can change the color of data labels and axes titles. Proceed with caution. Generally, you want to use a single color for all visual titles. As with all the guidelines in this paper, there are always situations and reasons to “break the rules”, but if you do decide to break the rules, do it for a good reason.

Colors for categorical values

Charts with a series typically have a categorical value in the legend. For example, each color in the legend below represents a different category of Country/Region.  The colors Power BI uses by default were chosen to provide a good color separation between categorical values so they are easy to distinguish. Sometimes people change these colors to match their corporate scheme etc. but it can lead to problems.

By sticking to a single hue and varying the intensity of the color, this visual has introduced a false sense of ordering between the categories. It implies the darker bubbles are higher or lower on some scale than the lighter hues. Other than alphabetical, there’s normally no inherent order in this sort of categorical value. To change the default colors, open the Formatting pane, and select Data colors.

Colors for numerical values

For fields that do have some inherent order and numerical value, you can also color data points by the value. This can be helpful to show the spread of values across the data, and also allow for two variables to be shown on a single chart.  Color can also be used to emphasize variance around a central value. For example, coloring positive values green and negative values red. Be aware of cultural differences when assigning colors to positive or negative values; not all cultures use red for bad and green for good!

Visual types and best practices

Power BI provides many visual types natively. To these, add the custom visuals available from Microsoft and from the Power BI community and total visual options become too numerous to document here. But let’s look at some of the most-used native visual types. Line charts are a powerful way to look at data over time. Looking at data in tables doesn’t really take advantage of the speed in which our eyes spot peaks, valleys, cycles, and patterns.

Best practices

• When people look at line charts, the first thing they see is the shape of the curve. This means that you need to have an x-axis that makes the curve meaningful such a time or distribution categories. If you put categorical fields like product or geography on the x-axis, the line chart will not be interesting as the shape of the curve would provide no meaningful information.

• If you choose to place multiple charts, line up the X-axis. Use filters to make sure that the same range of values is shown. For example, if you’re looking at date ranges, ensure they are the same date ranges. For example, 1896 to 2012 on both charts.

• Make full use of the space. If it makes sense for your data, set the start and end points for the Y-axis to eliminate empty space at the top and bottom of your chart and to focus in on the actual data points. To do this, select the paint roller icon to open the Formatting pane. Expand the Y-Axis area and set the Start and End points.

• Another reason to explicitly set the Start and End points is if you’re comparing two or more charts on the same page using the same Y-axis field. For example, if you’re looking at cumulative event counts, and the United Kingdom has counts that range from 1 to 70 and Australia has counts that range from 1 to 12, the 2 line charts will display very different Y-axes (Figure x). This makes it difficult to compare at a glance. Instead, set the charts to use the same Y-axis range (Figure x).

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story at a glance

The overall test should be that somebody without any prior knowledge can quickly understand the report without any explanation from anybody. With a quick glance, readers should be able to quickly see what the page is about and what each chart/table is about. When readers look at your report, their eyes should be drawn to the element you want them to look at first and their eyes will then continue left-right-top-down. YOu can change this behavior by adding visual cues like text box labels, shapes, borders, size, and color. Remember that the function of your report is to meet a business need; not to be pretty. But some level of beauty is required, especially when it comes to first impressions.

Nashville consultant Tony Bodoh explains "Emotion fires a half-second before logic can kick in." Readers will first react at an emotional level to your report page, before they take more time to dig deeper. If your page looks disorganized, confusing, unprofessional…your reader may never discover the powerful story it tells.

Concentrate on creating a common theme or look for your report, and apply it to all pages of the report; using standalone images and other graphics to support and not detract from the real story; and applying all the best practices we discussed up to this point in the article.

Removing Visual Header for Non Visuals

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• Query name should not have spaces
• Avoid spaces when naming Columns and Measures

Security

Managed Roles

To define security roles, you can do the following.

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You cannot assign users to a role within Power BI Desktop. This is done within the Power BI service. You can enable dynamic security within Power BI Desktop by making use of the username() or userprincipalname() DAX functions and having the proper relationships configured.

Power BI RLS Process 

To learn how to use the technique of the Power BI RLS Process we must explain briefly the Role Managing. Start following these steps:

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See below images with the role containing the Pediatrics department with Pathology:

Manage security on your model

To manage security on your data model, you will want to do the following.

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You can only create or modify roles within Power BI Desktop.

Working with membersAdd members

You can add a member to the role by typing in the email address, or name, of the user, security group or distribution list you want to add. This member has to be within your organization. You cannot add Groups created within Power BI.

You can also see how many members are part of the role by the number in parenthesis next to the role name, or next to Members.

Remove members

You can remove members by selecting the X next to their name.

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Data security

All distribution group members have the same permissions to the data as the content pack creator. The one exception to this is SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) on-premises tabular datasets. Because the reports and dashboards are connecting live to the on-premises SSAS model, the credentials of each individual distribution group member are used to determine the data he or she can access.

Creating APP for Shared Content SecurityApp workspaces

App workspaces are the places where you create apps, so to create an app, you first need to create the app workspace. If you’ve ever worked in a group workspace in Power BI, then app workspaces will be familiar. They’re the evolution of group workspaces – staging areas and containers for the content in the app.

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After workspaces have been created in O365, it will appear in the app in Power BI, too.

Distribute an app

When you’ve finished creating and perfecting the dashboards and reports in your app workspace, you package it all up as an app and distribute it.

1. In the workspace, select the Publish app button in the upper right to start the process of sharing all the content in that workspace.
   
2. First, on Details, fill in the description to help people find the app. You can set a background color to personalize it.
   
3. Next, on Content, you see the content that’s going to be published as part of the app – everything that’s in that workspace. You can also set the landing page – the dashboard or report people will see first when they go to your app. You can choose None. Then they’ll land on a list of all the content in the app
   
4. Last, on Access, decide who has access to the app: either everyone in your organization, or specific people or email distribution lists.
   
5. When you select Finish, you see a message confirming it’s ready to publish.
6. In the success dialog box, you can copy the URL that’s a direct link to this app and send it to the people you’ve shared it with.
   
   The business users that you've distributed the app to can find it in two different ways. You can send them the direct link to the app, or they can search for it in Microsoft AppSource, where they see all the apps that they can access. Either way, after that whenever they go to Apps, they’ll see this app in their list.

Change your published app

After you publish your app, you may want to change or update it. You notice that when you open your app from Apps, even though you’re the one who published it, you can’t edit it – Edit Report is grayed out.

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1. Open the app workspace that corresponds to the app.
   

2. Open the dashboard or the report. You see that you can make any changes you want.

   The app workspace is your staging area, so your changes aren't pushed live to the app until you publish again. This lets you make changes without affecting the published apps.

3. Go back to the app workspace list of contents and select Update app.
   
4. Update Details, Content, and Access, if you need to, then select Update app.
   
   The people you’ve distributed the app to automatically see the updated version of the app.

Unpublish an app

Any member of an app workspace can unpublish the app.

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• If you already have two or more datasets in Power BI with the same name as the Power BI Desktop file, publish could fail. Make sure you have only one dataset in Power BI with the same name. You can also rename the file and publish, creating a new dataset with same name as the file.
• If you rename or delete a column or measure, any visualizations you already have in Power BI with that field could be broken.
• Power BI ignores some format changes of existing columns. For example, if you change a column’s format from 0.25 to 25%.
• If you have a refresh schedule configured for your existing dataset in Power BI and you add new data sources to your file and then re-publish, you’ll have to sign into them in Manage Data Sources prior to the next scheduled refresh.
• When you republish a dataset published from Power BI Desktop and have a refresh schedule defined, a dataset refresh is initiated as soon as you republish.

Power BI Apps FAQ

How are app workspaces different from group workspaces?

With this release, we have renamed all group workspaces to app workspaces. You can publish an app from any of these workspaces. The functionality remains on par with group workspaces for the most part. Over the next few months, we plan on the following enhancements to app workspaces:

• Creating app workspaces won't create corresponding entities in Office 365 like group workspaces do. So you can create any number of app workspaces without worrying about different Office 365 groups being created behind the scenes (you can still use an Office 365 group’s OneDrive for Business to store your files).
• Today you can add only individuals to the members and admin lists. Soon you'll be able to add multiple AD security groups or modern groups to these lists to allow for easier management.

How are apps different from organizational content packs?

Apps are an evolution and simplification of content packs, with a few major differences.

• After business users install a content pack, it loses its grouped identity: it's just a list of dashboards and reports interspersed with other dashboards and reports. Apps, on the other hand, maintain their grouping and identity even after installation. This makes it easy for business users to continue to navigate to them over time.
• You can create multiple content packs from any workspace, but an app has a 1:1 relationship with its workspace. We believe this makes apps easier to understand and maintain over the long run. See the roadmap section of the Power BI blog for more on how we plan to improve this area.
• Over time we plan to deprecate organizational content packs, so we recommend you create apps from now on.

What about read-only members in groups?

In groups, you can add read-only members who can only view the content. The main problem with this approach was that you couldn't add security groups as members. With apps, you can publish a read-only version of your app workspace to large audiences, including security groups. You can stage your changes to the dashboards and reports in the app without affecting end users. We recommend that you use apps in this way in the future. Over the long run, we plan to deprecate read-only members of workspaces as well.

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