Give your PowerBI Report Audience more power through- ‘Personalize visuals’
Power BI Personalize visuals and Perspective feature
“Can we change this barchart to a pie chart or may be a Donut chart?”
As a Report Developer, you must have often heard a similar question or suggestion from your report audience. I can say that I have received such requests from few enthusiastic audience/end users more than once to change a visual in the report to suit their visualisation preference.
I have always believed that a Report Developer’s objective is to develop reports using visuals (Graphs/Charts/Tables) that most effectively communicate the intended information to the Business users, Stakeholders and Management teams who are our major Report Consumers/Audience. However, we all must have faced situations where the report that looks perfect to us, may not fit the idea of few users and they want to change the chart type, chart axis, chart values or add/change the information in the tooltip.
Now, I must admit that often I agree with the demand of the end user but sometimes I do not like to change the chart, if the request to change is from one user while majority of other users approve the current format and the change may overall affects the display and flow of information in the report.
Now, PowerBI’s new features — ‘Personalise visual’ and ‘Perspectives’ can be a saviour in such situations and provide the end users with the capability to explore and customise their reports in the report view mode without affecting the report display for other users.
What changes can be made by user through Personalise Visuals?
Personalise visual are ideal for providing the report consumers some basic modification capabilities to their specific views; such as:
- Change the visualization type
- Change the measure/dimension in the report or in other words change axis and values in visualisation
- Add or remove a legend
- Change aggregations type in the chart
How to enable ‘Personalise Visual’ feature?
The ‘Personalise Visual’ feature is a Report feature and is not available for Dashboards. To use the feature, it needs to be enabled in the particular report from the Settings option. The feature can be enabled from PowerBI service as well as Desktop
PowerBI Service: Goto to workspace; select the ellipses next to the report and click on Settings. The following window will open up. Enable the ‘Personalise Visuals’ option.
PowerBI Desktop: The Personalise visual can also be activated through PowerBI Desktop. Goto File>Options and Settings>Options>Current File. Enable the Personalise visual feature
Now, when this feature is turned on, all the visuals in the report can be customised/modified by the report user. To prevent this, say you just want a user to be able to modify only one visual in the report, for visuals which should not have the feature to be customised deactivate ‘personalise visual’ at the visual level. This can be done in PowerBI Desktop by selecting the visual> Goto its Formating Tab and turn personalise visual option off.
How a Report Consumer can make changes to the Report?
The Report Consumer/ Reader can make changes in the reading view of the report which is shared with the user through workspace or App. In the Report, click on the visual, if the report can be personalised/modified by the reader, the ‘Perosnalise this visual icon’ would appear. Clicking the icon would provide the options to the Report consumer/reader to make changes to the visual. The Reader can make changes such as changing chart type, Axis of the Visualisation, Values displayed in the Visualisation, Modifying Legends and adding fields in Tooltip.
The changes made to the report can be saved by the user through Personal Bookmarks. Goto Bookmarks (on the top of the report)>Add a Personal Bookmark and save the bookmark for the personalised view of the report.
P.S: The changes made to the report are specific to the user who customised the visual, and would not have any impact on the report view for other users. However, if the user wants to share the customised view with others, it can be shared by sharing the report (provided the user has reshare permission) through the share button and selecting ‘include my changes’.
What is ‘Perspective’ and its purpose?
Till now, we have learned about how to allow the report users to customise their view of the reports. This process works fine, in situations where the data model is simple with few fields and tables. However, in complex data models, providing personalise visual feature with the full access to all the dimensions and measures in the data model can prove to be confusing for the user who does not have access to the data model and is unaware of the relation between different tables.
Therefore, in such scenarios, it makes sense to provide access only to the relevant subset of the data model to the user using ‘Perspectives’. The Perspective may include any or all fields from Datamodel; however, I prefer to include only the fields that are relevant to the information being displayed on the specific report page that contains visuals that can be personalised.
How to create Perspective?
Perspective as I understand for simplicity is a subset of the data model. It can be created using Tabular Editor; therefore, it is important to have Tabular Editor installed on the machine. From PowerBI Desktop>External Tools> select Tabular Editor. The Tabular Editor window will open up. Create a new Perspective and add the required tables and columns in the Perspective by selecting the table/column and choosing ‘ Show in perspective’. Once all required fields are added to perspective, click on Save icon.
The Perspective is now created and can be used in the report. To provide access to only the created perspective to the user while personalising the visual, in the PowerBI Desktop goto Format option of Report Page by clicking on the highlighted Format Icon in the image below. In the Personalise Visual field, choose the Perspective created for the report.
Now, the user while personalising the visual in the report, will only have the access to the created perspective and the fields added to the Perspective. Thereby, creating perspective limits the fields shown to the user which leads to less confusion for the user.
Conclusion:
Personalise Visual is a powerful feature that provides a more interactive and customisable reports to the report audience especially for the users who would like to customise or change the report as per their specific requirement. The feature is a bliss to the report creater and the users as it enables to create a generic report for a broad audience and a customisable report for selective users.The bonus is — the changes are done all within the Report Reader view!!
