Share your thoughts on the new On-Object Interaction feature (preview)

[RosieL]

Hit Reply to tell us what you think about the new On-Object Interaction feature so we can continue to improve.

For example:

• What changes would you like to see?
• If you turned off the preview switch, why?
• Any suggestions for addititional settings or capabilities?

Thanks,

-Power BI team

To read more about the feature, see the announcement in the Power BI Product Blog or our documentation on how to Use on-object interaction

FAQs:

• Q: How can I open multiple panes at once?
  • A: You can CTRL + click or right click on the unselected pane you wish to open and choose "Open in new pane"
• Q: Where did aggregations move to?
  • A: It's still on right click of a field, or you can use the new flyout aggregations dropdown while choosing or swapping a field.
• Q: Where did drillthrough and tooltip page setup move to?
  • A: Drillthrough is now in the page settings of the format pane under Page Information > Page type > Drillthrough or Tooltip.

[edavey]

Turned off the preview after trying to use it.  Took too long to edit / too many mouse clicks.

[TBradford]

Incredibly disorienting. Why not post a video showing the new interface in action?

As a new user, I bought a course (Xelplus.com) to learn how to build reports in Power BI. It seems that went completely out of date before I finished it! 

Why did I turn the preview off? On the first attempt to use the new interface the whole application effectively locked-up. Every click generated a "ding" but no visual clues about what was wrong. Even the file menu was inaccessible. I had to kill the Power BI processes with task manager, restart, and turn-off the preview feature before it locked-up again. 

[kahnailee]

On-Object is useless without the ability to change field aggregations; there's no option to change it after you "Add Data" in the field well. Instead, you either need to live with it, or change the summarization type of the column/field itself, which is not ideal and not sustainable with multiple visuals needing independent aggregations over the same field.

[F_Fitti]

I had a similar issue, and it turns out the options are still there, just not so easy to find the right place where you need to right-click with the mouse to be able to change summarizations. You can see the details on this post below (message #96):

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Desktop/Share-your-thoughts-on-the-new-On-Object-Interaction-featur...

I can now change summarization if I right click right on the data item label name. If you click on any of the other visual elements such as the "x" or the arrow pointing to the right, it does not work.  They said they will change into something more intuitive.

[kahnailee]

THANK YOU!! That worked on my end. 

[QC]

PBI Desktop April release just came out: despite almost universal feedback from the community, the data and visual panes are still nested, with no option to show both at the same time. It is a huge drag on productivity, especially for people using PBI on daily basis and manage many reports.

I am disappointed. Does our voice matter? 

[RosieL]

We have a solution on its way! To effectively implement and test a larger change like this PBI engineering tends to work 2 months ahead of releases. Therefore, this change is currently expected for June release, we appreciate your patience.

[QC]

Thank you Rosie! Great to know MS listens 😄 , I look foward to the update

[BaBallero]

I turned off the preview. For my daily work I simply need more clicks to make changes on the visual what I don´t like.

[F_Fitti]

I think I ran into a possible visual bug, or at least some new behavior that I did not encounter prior to the on-object interaction preview. 

I have a very large multi-row card with many indicators. I was asked to change the order of some elements in the card. One of the items had to be moved up 2 positions up i.e. item number 5 would have to be placed in between 3 and 4, effectively becoming the new number 4 on the list.  My data items all have large labels that are larger than the standard width of the on-object "build a visual" data window, so when I mouse over any of them, a pop-up displaying the full item label shows up, which is really nice to allow me to distinguish between the elements in the visual. 

However, that same pop-up is not "transparent", and it blocks the visual behind it. This effectively obscures the lines that separate elements, which is the very precise space where we need to mouse in in order to either drop new elements into the field well or when rearranging their order. This would not be a problem if I were moving my item several positions up or down because the pop up is not so bing, but if all one is trying to do is move them one or two positions up, there is no way of releasing the mouse button on the very precise spot which allows them to be arranged in order. I ended up having to first move the item several positions down, so that the pop-up would not obscure the target area where I had to drag the item to have it drop in the right position I needed it to be. 

I'm adding a few screenshots pieced together in windows paint just to illustrate. Had to obscure my data item labels for privacy reasons, but I think it still helps understand what the issue is. If the full label pop-up would be at partially transparent or not block the interaction of the mouse with the field well behind it, I think this would work as a solution. 

[RosieL]

Thanks for this detailed feedback. We already have a bug tracking the tooltip getting in the way of drag/drop and should have a fix out soon. We are also improving the drag/drop zones to be larger so less precision will be needed. As a workaround, you can use this right click option to "move" items up/down within the same field well or the "move to" option to move items to a different field well. 

[zilka193]

I turned it on, tested it on a few graphs, and turned it back off - for the reasons already all mentioned above. What I find most annoying is that you need to chose between the Data panel and the Visualizations panel when you want to quickly review your individual graphs. Cumbersome and not user-friendly imho.

[GregMarbais]

I really like where this is heading. I have 1 feature request and 1 (maybe 2) bug(s):

Feature: Add the ability to multi-select fields when adding to the visual from the on-object field selector

Bug: when I have a table and add a field to it from the on-object field selector, the visual will change the field that the visual is sorting on. Also with the table visual, when I've added a handful of measures, the ability to drag and drop measures to rearrange the columns breaks - the system will not allow me to grab a measure in the on-object field well which means I can't drag it into a different position.

[EwanT]

Thanks for the feedback. We have just begun looking into multi-select for a future update

Unfortunately for your first bug I wasn't able to see this happening. If you could share your repro steps from the start of creating a new visual, I can share that with the engineering team to investigate.

For your second bug, two things could be happening:

1. The "Suggest a visual" toggle is on
   1. If this toggle is on then drag and drop is disabled. Please try turning this off to reorder 
2. The suggest a visual toggle is off, then the drag and drop zones are hard to use
   1. We have logged a bug around the drag and drop being too hard. We are working on a fix that will increase the size, but as of right now the drop zones are only the space between fields which makes it hard to use. Please use right-click on the field name and use the menu options for "Move" until we have a fix for this bug

[GregMarbais]

@EwanT For #2, turning off the suggest visual worked. When it was on, I couldn't even grab the measure to try and move it but when it's off I could. #1 is likely related to it - when you sort by a column other than the first column in a table then turn on or off the suggest a Visual feature - PBI changes the sort column back to the first column. It doesn't do that when you have Suggest Visual turned off and move columns around.

[EwanT]

Thanks for clarifying that for me. I see what you mean now. You are spot on with your statement.

For the Suggest a type feature, with the toggle on Power BI will keep updating the visual type as you add data, remove data, change aggregations. 

We automatically turn the toggle off, if you do something like rename the visual, change background color, etc because we use this as an indicator that you are happy with the visual type and want to keep it.

Would you consider changing the sort of a column in a table, an indicator that you would like to keep the visual type as a table(In this case, we would turn the suggest a type toggle off)? 

[HDBI]

Hi,

This is just my personal preference but here are two suggestions:

1.  Allow user to drag the width of the "Build a Visual" floating pane for the visual.  For me, it is so narrow that it is not efficient to use as I have to hover over each measure / column to see what's in there (as the names are cut-off due to the narrow width).  Allowing the user to click this pane and drag it wider (or allow a user-selected preferred width setting so it is always as wide as the user would like) of these panes would be helpful.

2.  Allow the user to toggle the "Visualizations" pane on/off via the "View" menu in the ribbon at the top (just like you allow the Data and Formatting panes to be toggled on/off) so the user could either click on the the visual to get the "Build a Visual" floating pane or retain the original pane on the right-hand side of the screen (as it has always been).

I actually turned this preview off for now but it was a good start!

[RosieL]

Thank you for this feedback. We are definitely looking at #1, to be able to resize the build menu. #2 should be coming with the June release, stay tuned!

[gcn]

I try to adjust some visuals that I switch with bookmark navigation: moving from switch buttons to format pane is somehow strange, I need to click outside visuals (deselect visuals) to be able to display formatting details for a specific visual, after I format another visual - the selection pane is not helping, even if I click on the second visual title in the selection pane.

The visuals are grouped, I know I need to click twice... I'm inclined to believe it's related to the new features...

[gcn]

Interesting, but... I need to disable it 😞

Not an MVP yet, a lot of features are not mature enough, and overall productivity is worse.

Especially when reordering columns in a table, it breaks (strange behavior like action on the wrong column or a different column jumping with the chosen one), jumps to the beginning and forces me to do a lot of scroll.

All panes are flying like a hell, I need to adjust width frequently because I remove them by mistake, and the contextual pane for the visual is not wide enough, too short (at the bottom of the page).

I would keep the panes on the right, sticky (influenced by the options menu), or make them harder to disappear by mistake. 😄 

Do not close the project, but it is not ready yet for testing.

[EwanT]

Thank you for the feedback. We are looking into making the contextual panes easier to work with and reduce scrolling, but I don't have a timeline to share on these improvements

For moving the Build pane to the right with the other panes, please stay tuned. This should be coming in the June update