Alignment Guides Not Working with Grouped Shapes in Power BI – Impact on Interactive Menus

[Felipesantan_br]

Hi Power BI Community!

I’m experiencing an issue with the Alignment Guides (red lines) in Power BI Desktop, particularly when working with grouped shapes.

I often create interactive menus using grouped shapes combined with buttons and indicators. Grouping is essential for managing actions like showing or hiding menus based on user interactions. However, I’ve noticed that once shapes are grouped, the Alignment Guides stop working.

It seems that after grouping, Power BI treats the group as a single entity, preventing precise alignment of individual shapes within the group. This makes it challenging to align menus or adjust elements accurately within the report layout.

I’ve tried a few workarounds:

• Ungrouping the objects temporarily: While this works, it’s inconvenient and adds unnecessary steps to the workflow, especially when frequent adjustments are needed.
• Using the Align and Distribute options: These help to some extent but don’t address the absence of guides for dynamic adjustments within groups.
• I’ve ensured that Alignment Guides and Snap to Objects are enabled, and both work fine when the shapes are not grouped.

I’m wondering if this is a current limitation in Power BI or if there’s a configuration I might be missing. If it’s a limitation, it would be incredibly helpful for Power BI to support alignment guides within groups, especially given that grouping is a common practice for creating dynamic, interactive menus.

Has anyone else encountered this issue? How do you handle this situation? And does anyone know if Microsoft has plans to improve this functionality in future updates?

Thank you for your help and suggestions! 😊

[bchager]

@Felipesantan_br I've found that selecting a specific visual within a group, or double clicking on it, allows me to change its alignment and size. Have you tried this? You should still be able to use the alignment tool to center two different visualizations from different groups as well, like how I have the pie chart in the top group aligned with the table in the second group.

[Felipesantan_br]

Thank you for the suggestion! I already use the functionality you mentioned, and it is indeed helpful in some situations. However, it doesn’t fully resolve the issue I’m facing.

To provide more context, here’s a specific example of the problem I’m encountering. When designing my report layout, I use a blue grid as a guide to define the spacing and alignment between visuals. When a visual is ungrouped, I can easily drag its edges close to the grid lines, and the alignment guides "snap" the edges perfectly to the grid, ensuring everything stays aligned and visually consistent.

However, when the visuals are grouped, this snapping behavior completely stops working. The grouped visuals don’t recognize the grid lines, and I am forced to adjust their positions manually, which often results in imprecise alignment. This issue becomes particularly frustrating when trying to maintain consistent and professional-looking alignment across multiple visuals in more complex report layouts.