In this video, we're gonna have a look at the styles and formatting options associated with a visualisation in Power BI. So, in Power BI, when you are creating reports, you may add various visualisations, and once you've added the visualisation to the page, you may wanna work with a variety of properties that are associated with that particular visualisation. We're gonna have a little look at the table visualisation, and some of the key properties that are associated with that particular visualisation. Now, I've got this report here where I've added in 'month' and 'quantity', just a simple, kind of, table visualisation. I've gotta make sure I've got that visualisation selected, so I'm gonna click on it, and then on the right-hand side, on my ‘visualizations’ pane, I've gotta go and click on the paint-roller icon or 'format' icon, as it's called there. So, if I click on that, that will reveal all the properties associated with that visualisation. Now, I'm using a table visualisation. However, if I was using another visualisation, then the properties may vary depending on which one you've chosen. So, if I-, I'm on that 'format' option there. Let's have a look at 'style'. The style allows you to change the overall look of the table, so I can click on the little dropdown here where it says 'default', and I might wanna choose something like 'contrast alternating rows', and there you can see the impact it has on the table visualisation. If I wanna go back to how it was, I've got this link here to allow me to go back to how it was by reverting to default, and there you can see it goes back again.

Another property which is quite useful is 'grid'. Now, by default your horizontal grid lines are showing. You may wanna show vertical grid lines, and you can do that by simply selecting the slider. As you can see, it's put the vertical grid lines in, but then I can also change the colours, because it's quite, kind of, grey and quite bland. I could go down to the horizontal grid lines and I can change the colour to a much bolder colour. Just gonna go for this one, and you can see it divides up the rows much better. Much more visually appealing. If I move down, I've got this 'column headers' property. So, this is where we can, kind of, change the font style, the 'font family', as it says there, font size, and I can also make the headers bold by clicking the slider. I can switch them on or off. Some visualisations may already have the bold on, but you can switch them on and off. And I could also work with the alignment there as well. So, the alignment dropdowns, I've got 'left', 'centre', and 'right'. Further down, I've got the field formatting options, and this is really good, because you can affect the way your data is showing in the table. So, for example, if I change the dropdown to the 'quantity' column, I may wanna display the quantity as thousands, and you can see, rather than displaying all the digits, it just gives me a different way of looking at the data, or I can actually change the display units quite easily there as well. And along with those, there's lots other, other properties that you may wanna explore. So, here are some tip tips in Power PI. When you're working with the field property settings, you can only assign one alignment option per column in a table. So, you can either have left, centre, or align per column.

The second top tip is, if you are bringing data from a source which has a lot of non-printing characters, for example, new line breaks, Power BI will just simply ignore those by default. If you didn't want Power BI to ignore those, then you'd have to switch the 'word wrap' option on, which can also be done from the 'properties' pane. A third option is, when you bring data into Power BI, it does a, kind of, auto sizing. So, it looks at the first twenty columns or first twenty columns and 50 rows of the data, and it resizes the table based on that. After that, it's a bit like the Wild West. If you've got data all over the place, Power BI may react quite differently. So, that's how we work with Power BI for Desktop interface on some of the styles and formatting options.

Styles and formatting

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