Power BI Desktop UI Elements — Part 2

• Overview
• Pre-requisites
• Panes in Power BI Desktop
• Filters Pane, Visualizations Pane, Fields Pane
• Selection Pane, Bookmarks Pane, Performance Analyzer, and Sync Slicers
• Custom Visuals / AppSource in Power BI Desktop

Overview:

Hey Folks!!! Welcome to the 3rd article of the Power BI Series!

As we were going through different Power BI Desktop Elements in our 2nd article. We have some more elements in the Power BI Desktop which are covered as part of this blog. So, Let’s get started with it!

Note — For the people who are new to this blog, it’s recommended for you to go through the First & Second blogs of Power BI Desktop.

Pre-requisites:

• The Latest Version of the Power BI Desktop is installed on your system
• Any sample dataset in the form of an Excel file loaded in Power BI Desktop

Panes in Power BI Desktop:

There are Seven Panes in Power BI Desktop out of which three are used very frequently for report building activity and these three are always available on the Report View in Power BI Desktop which is listed below:

• Filters Pane
• Visualizations Pane
• Fields Pane

Additional Pane:

• Selection Pane
• Bookmarks Pane
• Performance Analyzer
• Sync Slicers

Let’s have a look at them one by one to get a better understanding.

Filters Pane:

• Filters Pane is mainly used to add filters to the report. It consists of 3 important sections
• Filters on this Visual — To Apply Filters on the selected visual in the Report view. (This section will be shown when we select any visual on the UI)

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• Filters on this Page — To Apply Filter on the Current Page in the Report view
• Filters on all Pages — To Apply Filters on all the Pages of the Report

Note: Using the show/hide Symbol, we can either show this Pane to the users or Hide the Pane from the users.

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Visualizations Pane

• The Visualizations Pane contains all the visuals enabled in Power BI Desktop by default
• Each of these visuals from the Build Visual section can be dragged or selected on the UI and data can be plotted according to each visual

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• The Cross-Report feature can be enabled through this pane which helps us to drill through from one report to another report in the same workspace or app
• We can also Format the Page from the below “Format Your Report Page section”
• Format Your Report Page has options to update the page in the report

Format Your Report Page Section Elements:

• Page Information — We can rename the Page name, Allow the page to be used as tooltip & allow Q&A feature on the page

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• Canvas Settings — To change the dimensions of the page i.e., height & width, and the Alignment of the report screen on the UI (Top or Middle)
• Canvas Background — This allows us to change the background color, add a background image and set the image fit for the background

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• Wallpaper — This allows us to add a Wallpaper background for the report page
• Filter Pane & Filter Cards — Allow us to customize all the Filter Pane Sections and elements

Fields Pane:

• Fields Pane has the information related to Tables & their Columns and the Measures which will be created on the report side

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• We can create new measures, change the data type of columns, rename the column names, hide the columns, and create hierarchies on the columns from the Fields pane
• Column data type, measures & calculated columns have different symbol notations before their names which will help us in understanding the data & the metrics of the table

Additional Panes:

These Panes can be enabled from the View Ribbon, i.e.,

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Selection Pane:

• This pane provides a list of all the objects/elements on the current page and allows the user to decide whether a specific visual will be visible or not. This will allow us to efficiently use the space given to us within the report page

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• This Pane allows us to change the order of objects or elements on the page

Bookmarks Pane:

• This pane allows us to capture the current state of a report page

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• Bookmarks save the current filters and slicers, cross-highlighted visuals, sort order, drill location etc., When others view your report, they can get back to that exact state by selecting your saved bookmark
• There are two ways of building bookmarks: Bookmarks on All Visuals & Selected Visuals

Performance Analyzer:

• This pane allows us to find out how each of our report elements, such as visuals and DAX formulas, are performing

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• Using the Performance Analyzer, we can see and record logs that measure how each of our report elements performs when we interact with them

Sync Slicers:

• This pane allows us to sync the common slicer visuals across different pages in Power BI Desktop

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• There are two important icons in this Pane. Those are Refresh icon & Eye icon
• Refresh Icon: It means the slicer can slice and dice the selected pages i.e., whichever box is checked in that column
• Eye Icon: It means the Visibility of the Slicer Visual
• Advanced Options in Sync Slicers:

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• “Sync Field changes to other slicers” : The 1st Option enables us to Sync the slicers in such a way that when we change the source column (or) field in 1 slicer visual of a group (Let’s say Group1), then it will change the columns (or) fields in all the other slicer visuals which are assigned to the same group name
• The 2nd Option “Sync Filter changes to other slicers” works similar to the 1st Option, but this will enable the Filter Changes to be applied on the other slicers of the same group

Note: If the Sync is enabled to a slicer for the “Main” Page & “Summary” Page, it will slice the data of the “Summary” Page whenever some value is selected in the slicer visual of the “Main” Page, even if the slicer is not made Visible for the summary page

Custom Visuals / AppSource:

• To get more visuals, we can either navigate to Home Ribbon and get the Visuals from More Visuals -> From AppSource or In the Visualizations pane, we can click on the Ellipsis (…) -> Get More Visuals

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Here We can find custom visuals created by Third-Party Organizations.

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Note: It is always recommended to use Microsoft Certified Custom Visuals, which is indicated with a blue tick icon.

And that’s all folks! I hope you have got an understanding of different elements in Power BI Desktop with this article!! Thank you for reading this blog, I hope you found it insightful. Please do follow for more content on Power BI. And let us know if there are any queries in the Respond section below.