4D. Enhance Power BI report designs for the user experience

Question 1

What three levels are included in a guided analytical experience?

Answer 1

• High-level metrics
• Supporting visuals
• Details, when required

Question 2

What four techniques can you use to show details in a report?

Answer 2

• Use drillable visuals
• Add tooltips
• Add drillthrough
• Embed paginated reports

Question 3

What is visual is an excellent choice when wanting a drillable visual?

Answer 3

The matrix visual is an excellent choice because it allows drilling on rows and/or columns. Therefore, by assigning hierarchies or multiple fields, report consumers can drill to the level of detail that they want. For example, the matrix rows could show years, and the report consumer could drill down to quarter, month, and date levels.

Question 4

What should you keep in mind when adding a drillable visual?

Answer 4

Ensure that the visual size is sufficient for consumers to view drill-down details, or you can teach your report consumers how to use focus mode to enlarge the visual. Also, you can add buttons to provide a quick way for report consumers to drill to specific levels.

Question 5

What are the two kinds of tooltips?

Answer 5

• Visual (i.e. just numerical)
• Page (or an image)

Question 6

What can help you decide between using tooltip pages vs drillthrough pages?

Answer 6

Page tooltips don’t support interactivity. If you want your report consumers to interact with the visuals, create a drillthrough page instead.

Question 7

What is a drillthrough page, and what is its main benefit?

Answer 7

Drillthrough will navigate the report consumer to a different page, possibly in a different report, and it can show details. The main benefit of drillthrough is that you don’t need to clutter a report page with details. Instead, the details are available when required.

Question 8

What is a common use-case workflow for using drill through pages?

Answer 8

• View a report page.
• Identify a visual element to analyze in depth.
• Right-click the visual element to drill through.
• Perform complimentary analysis.
• Return to the source report page.

Question 9

How can you help consumers know that drillthrough pages exist?

Answer 9

Add a button to the report

Question 10

How can you use paginated reports inside a Power BI report?

Answer 10

Use the Paginated report visual to embed a Power BI paginated report in your report. Paginated reports can connect directly to source databases, providing you with the ability to present transaction-level detail that’s not stored in the Power BI semantic model.

You can map fields from your Power BI semantic model to report parameter values for your paginated report visual, allowing report consumers to cross filter the paginated report. This way, it can behave like a drillthrough page.

In the visual format options, you can enable the toolbar so that report consumers can use the export command. This command can export the paginated report in many different formats, including Microsoft Excel, PDF, Accessible PDF, CSV, PowerPoint, Microsoft Word, MHTML, and XML. Also, unlike the 150,000-row limitation that is imposed by Power BI reports, paginated reports can export up to 1,000,000 rows to Excel while retaining all formatting of the paginated report.

Question 11

How can you highlight values in a report?

Answer 11

• Conditional formatting
• Overlaid analytics
• Anomaly detection
• Specialized visuals

Question 12

What should you think of when highlighting in terms of accessibility?

Answer 12

Consider that report consumers might be blind or have low vision. Take care not to highlight by using only color. Instead, consider using icons that can use shape and color to communicate status.

Question 13

What is an example of an analytic overlay?

Answer 13

Trend lines, minimum lines, maximum lines.

Question 14

What AI options are available to visuals when there is a time series on the X-axis?

Answer 14

• Forecast
• Anomaly detection. This can help you highlight exceptional values

Question 15

Which specialized visuals can you use to highlight values?

Answer 15

• Key influencers
• Decomposition Tree

Question 16

How can you design reports that behave like apps?

Answer 16

By using buttons

Question 17

What are the preconfigured buttons and their actions?

Answer 17

• The Back action navigates to the previous page. It’s useful in drillthrough scenarios, allowing the report consumer to quickly return to where they drilled from.
• The Bookmark action activates a selected bookmark. Bookmarks can turn a Power BI report into a guided analytical experience, maximize available page real estate, and provide user-friendly interactions. Bookmarks are covered in the next unit.
• The Drillthrough action is assigned a target drillthrough destination page. The button remains disabled until drillthrough becomes a valid action, which is the case when you are interacting with a visual that can navigate to the drillthrough page. When the Drillthrough action is selected, Power BI navigates to the drillthrough page, propagating appropriate filters.
• The Page navigation action directs the report consumer to a specific report page. The page can be a specific page that is assigned at design time or a measure that returns the page name. Using a measure allows Power BI to dynamically determine the page based on the filter context.
• The Q&A action opens a pop-up window that allows the report consumer to explore data by using intuitive, natural language capabilities and receive answers as data visualizations.
• The Web URL action opens the URL by using the default web browser. Like the Page navigation action, this action can be a specific URL or one that is returned by a measure. The measure can produce a URL that appends filter context to the query string. For example, if the report consumer filters the page by a single customer, the measure can return a URL to an external system that includes the customer key in the query string.

Question 18

Why might you want to use a Q&A button instead of the Q&A visual?

Answer 18

Unlike the Q&A visual, a button that is assigned the Q&A action doesn’t occupy significant space on the report page.

Question 19

When might you consider using a Web URL button?

Answer 19

Consider using the Web URL action to create a bridge to resources that are commonly referenced in tandem. Web URL actions can be highly effective in prompting direct action in external systems.

Question 20

Can only buttons be assigned actions?

Answer 20

No, you can assign any type of action to images and shapes so that these elements can behave like buttons.

Question 21

What are the three states that bookmarks can capture?

Answer 21

• The Data state captures anything that impacts the queries that Power BI sends to the semantic model. For example, if a slicer is included in the scope of the bookmark, the Data state retains the applied slicer items when the bookmark was created (or updated). It will also capture sort order and the drill depth of a visual because the query is impacted.
• The Display state is related to the visibility of a report object. Objects consist of visuals and also elements like text boxes, buttons, shapes, and images. By using the Selection pane, you can hide or unhide objects and groups of objects. Additionally, you can swap visuals on a report page by creating bookmarks that capture hidden and unhidden objects.
• The Current page state determines whether the bookmark will direct the report consumer to the bookmarked page or apply the current page. Disabling the Current page state is rare, but you should consider some creative use cases. For example, on a page tooltip, a bookmark can change the visuals without navigating from the page that the report consumer has selected.

Question 22

What is the range of the scope of bookmarks?

Answer 22

• The All visuals scope is turned on by default, meaning that the bookmark applies to all report objects, even if hidden.
• The Selected visuals scope will target only those visuals that are selected when the bookmark was updated.

Question 23

What is a good tip for when you want to create a selected visuals bookmark to show/hide several objects?

Answer 23

Create a group of those objects and configure visibility for the group. That way, you can add or remove objects from the group without the need to update the bookmark.

Question 24

What are common use cases for bookmarks?

Answer 24

• Reset slicers
• Swap visuals
• Drill down multiple visuals and direct depth navigation
• Pop-up overlays

Question 25

How should you think about state and scope when creating a Reset slicers bookmark?

Answer 25

• Configure the bookmark to capture the Data state.
• Configure the bookmark to use the Selected visuals scope, targeting the slicers that you want to reset. The Selected visuals scope is key because you don’t want to impact other slicers or visuals. For example, if a drillable visual is on the page, the bookmark shouldn’t overwrite the drill state when it resets the slicers.

Question 26

How should you think about state and scope when creating Swap Visuals bookmarks?

Answer 26

Swapping a visual requires two bookmarks.
- Configure each bookmark to capture the Display state but not the Data state. These settings will preserve any sorting or additional filtering.
- Configure each bookmark to use the Selected visuals scope, targeting the initially visible visual and the hidden visual.

Question 27

How should you think about state and scope when creating Drill-down and Depth bookmarks?

Answer 27

• Configure each bookmark to capture the Data state, which preserves the drill state of visuals.
• Configure each bookmark to use the Selected visuals scope, targeting the visuals to update.

Question 28

What is a use-case for a Pop-up overlay bookmark?

Answer 28

A good example of a pop-up overlay is one that provides built-in assistance.

For example: when the report consumer selects the Help button in the lower-left corner of the page, a full-page image becomes visible. The image includes many coach marks, which point to the targeted objects on the report page. Also, the image uses transparency so that the underlying report design remains partially visible. When the report consumer selects anywhere on the page, the image becomes hidden (due to an action on the image that uses a bookmark).

Question 29

When in the design process should navigation UX components, like buttons, be considered?

Answer 29

To ensure seamless integration into your report design, these UX components should be considered early in the design process. Retrofitting buttons and actions to a report design can lead to an unintuitive and disjointed experience for report consumers.

Question 30

What design principles are important when adding navigational buttons?

Answer 30

• Buttons should be placed in relevant and consistent locations.
• If you have a constant visual element across pages within which you can select a specific page from several buttons, format them so that the button for the current page is highlighted.
• On drillthrough pages, ensure that a back button will provide a simple way for the report consumer to return to where they drilled from. An established convention is to use a left-pointing arrow icon for the button.

Question 31

How can you make it clear to users that buttons are interactive/clickable?

Answer 31

To begin with, the cursor will change when hovering over a button to show that it is clickable. Additionally, you can set up two additional formatting options to emphasize this further:
- On-hover formatting, i.e. the button might change colour, etc, when hovered over.
- Descriptive tooltips, i.e. configure a tooltip to appear when hovering that explains what happens if you click the button.

Question 32

What kind of actions can you launch from visual headers?

Answer 32

The visual header appears when you hover the cursor over the report object, and they can launch actions like
- focus mode
- drill up
- drill down.

You can also access the More options menu by selecting the ellipsis (…) button. This menu includes
- sorting options
- export
- spotlight
- and many others.

Question 33

What should you remember about spacing in relation to visual headers?

Answer 33

Always leave sufficient space for the visual headers to appear in the upper-right section of objects. This approach ensures a consistent experience for report consumers. Also, take care not to overlap objects because superimposed visual headers make it difficult for consumers to see or select icons..

Visual headers might appear in the upper or lower part of the object. Power BI attempts to show visual headers in the upper right of the object if sufficient space is available between the upper part of the object and the edge of the page. If no space is available in the upper part, Power BI will place the visual headers in the lower-right corner of the visual. If no space is available in either location, it will place the headers inside the visual in the upper right.

Question 34

Why might you want to disable all visual headers in report settings?

Answer 34

It might make sense to disable visual interactions when you are delivering a Power BI report to an audience that’s unfamiliar with Power BI or when you don’t expect them to interact with the report.

Question 35

Why might you want to disable visual headers for specific visuals/objects?

Answer 35

A good report design turns off visual headers for objects that don’t need them. Therefore, consider turning off visual headers for slicers and buttons and any other object that won’t be used to launch actions. Fewer visual headers will produce a cleaner and less distracting end result.

Question 36

Are your options only to enable or disable visual headers as a whole?

Answer 36

No. For those objects that have visual headers, consider disabling functionality that’s not appropriate or useful. You can disable all visual header icons, including the More options (…) menu.

Question 37

Given that Power BI reports can differ a lot, what is a good goal when designing reports?

Answer 37

When approaching a report design project, you should always aim to provide “no training required” experiences. Strive to add built-in assistance whenever possible.

Question 38

What are three techniques you can use to provide built-in assistance?

Answer 38

• Information page
• Visual header tooltip icon
• Button with overlay

Question 39

What is an information page, and what should you consider when designing one?

Answer 39

Adding an information page is the most simplistic technique to provide built-in assistance. Dedicate an entire report page that includes instructions and definitions.

Consider adding a back button to the page. Then, add a button in a consistent location on each page that navigates to the information page. Configure these buttons to use the Information or Help icon.

Question 40

What is a Visual header tooltip icon?

Answer 40

Within the visual header options, you can enable the visual header tooltip. It adds the Help (?) icon to the visual header. Then, you can assign a page tooltip or text. This technique is beneficial for providing visual-specific guidance, such as more detail that describes definitions, calculation logic, or the source of data.

Question 41

What is an aspect of report design that can impact performance, and how can you tune this aspect for better performance?

Answer 41

A common reason for poor performance is too many visuals on the same page. If you identify visuals as the bottleneck that has caused poor performance, take the following measures to tune the report:
- Reduce the number of visuals on the report page because fewer visuals means better performance. If a visual is not necessary and doesn’t add value to the user, you should remove it. Rather than using multiple visuals on the page, consider other ways to provide additional details, such as drillthrough pages and report page tooltips.
- Reduce the number of fields in each visual. The upper limit for visuals is 100 fields, so a visual with more than 100 fields will be slow to load (and will look cluttered and confusing). Identify fields that are not valuable to the visual and then remove them.

Question 42

How do you add a mobile view after creating a regular view report?

Answer 42

• To design the mobile-optimized view of a report page, start by opening the mobile layout view for that page. In Power BI Desktop, open the specific report page, select the View tab, and then select Mobile layout.
• This selection will result in showing a scrollable canvas that is shaped like a phone and a Visualizations pane that lists all visuals on the original report page.
• To add a visual to the mobile layout canvas, drag the visual from the Visualizations pane to the phone canvas, or double-click the visual in the Visualization pane. You can then resize and reposition the visual in the same way that you would a report page.

Question 43

What should you remember about visual responsiveness when designing for mobile?

Answer 43

By default, many visuals in Power BI are responsive, which means that they change dynamically to display the maximum amount of data and insight, regardless of the screen size. As a visual changes size, Power BI gives priority to the data and makes small changes, such as removing padding or repositioning the legend, so that the data remains visible. When it comes to configuring visuals for mobile reports, Power BI does all the hard work for you. However, if you want to turn off this default responsiveness, you can do so in the General section of the visual’s format settings.