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.

[SMHolck]

Thansk for the tip.  Were you able to get it to work?

Even after finding the new Page Type for Drill Through, I cannot get it to work.  I am curious when documentation will be updated.    I tried to turn this OOI feature off but then it would not let me untoggle the "Keep All Filters" option.  😞  I had to reenable OOI, change it back to Standard page, re-disable OOI and then I could create a drill through without keeping all filters.  But maybe there is some other option that goes with this that I can't find?

[WillDrotar]

Same here, link didn't help. Can't find documentation on this either.

[ddk]

Hi,
The June 2023 update brought some improvement, but still some issues.

Great to have the possibility to have the "Build a visual" pane on the right, however, it still needs a lot of clicks when using over different visuals.

e.g. the following situation:

• selecting a visual opens the "Build a visual" pane (after setting this up initially) = OK
• I also want the "Data" pane to open, so I have to click the "Open in new pane" = OK (2 panes opened)
• when I now click away from the visual, the "Build a visual" pane disappears: seems logical, however...
• when I then select the visual again (or another one), I have to repeat the same action to also show the data pane again...

Would be better if you really could decide yourself what panels to open/close/show.

[SDittmannFleet]

Second that. If applying bookmarks, especially, it's a huge pain in the neck.

[Cazvon]

Hi team

Have tried it after viewing some YouTube vids and was interested in how it worked for me.  I am a Intermmediate PBI user and found it very frustrating.  The Visualization pane offered me a more seemless approach to changes I wanted to make and I like the visual queues that are available to me at all times through the vis pane.  Will be turning it off.

[D_M]

Hello,

As a follow-up to my previous feedback, the new updates as of this month (June 20th at time of writing) do improve the situation, but the same fundamental issue remains [in terms of the basic behaviour of the panels on the right-hand side], so I still have to revert to the old/current behaviour for the sake of efficiency.

That said, I can now much more easily summarize my biggest concern/request, so again thank you for the updates so far.

And to summarise the main (remaining) requirement:

• We should have the option to setup our PBI desktop instance so that ALL panes on the right of the screen in PBI desktop should simply/exactly mimic the Filters pane behaviour in EVERY aspect, and by extension the current/old behaviour in place.
  To break this down further, this means that:
  • Once opened, each pane REMAINS open until we explictly close it.
  • The pane selected should REMAIN SELECTED when clicking on different visuals, regardless of which part of the visual is clicked on.
    • This is important since I'm often navigating between several visuals in quick succesion, with a view to comparing the same (context specific) formatting values between them [for example their X vertical position]. Therefore having to respecify which pane I need for that comparison as I move from one visual to another adds clicks to each interaction and noticeably slows down the process overall.
  • Closing the pane should simply mean clicking on the pane title (or the double chevron arrow), in which case it closes/folds closed, but remains available to open again with a SINGLE CLICK.
  • Removing the pane completely from the selected set should be treated as a different, higher level action and require clicking in the top panel (as per the Fields pane).
  • In this 'classic' mode the pane icons on the far right can/may be removed, since they are not required?

With this change/these changes, those of us who require the current pane behaviour on the right to remain as it is/was will be able to leverage the best of both worlds, or at least maintain the current behaviour if preferable. I understand the drive to make all Microsoft apps behave the same, but in this instance there's a very purposeful reason (or set of reasons) behind the difference of experience in Power BI. The 'single pane' concept is simply not useful or appropriate for many users of Power BI (and again, thanks for all the updates to this functionality so far, it seems to slowly be going in the right direction at least).

[ddk]

Totally agree!

https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/t5/Desktop/Share-your-thoughts-on-the-new-On-Object-Interacti...

[optimizer]

Tried it a couple of times, but turning it off. I don't like the extra clicks I have to make to add data and it is less intuitive to find formatting options. 

[Anonymous]

Hi there,

Since the June 2023 update I am having troubles with the preview features on-object interaction and field parameters when using them combined. I receive error messages that the report cannot be rendered, but when clicking close, the visual renders as expected. Very anyoing while developing, so for now I turned the on-object interaction preview feature off and I don't have trouble anymore. See also my separate thread about this issue:

https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/t5/Desktop/Field-parameters-in-visual-quot-An-error-occured-w... 

Version: 2.118.621.0 64-bit (June 2023)

[RosieL]

Thank you for reporting! We'll investigate what might be causing this error.

[CJSquibb]

This might be a problem I have experienced too: I was demonstrating Parameters in Power BI and I also had error messages and "send a report to Mocrosoft" dialogs come up, though the visuals had rendered successfully.  I submitted the reports, so hopefully you will have some bug reports to go through.

[TomGee702]

This is my second time enabling it, and I'm sorry to say, the second time I immediately turned it off.
While I like the convenience of having the formatting options right there, I would prefer that the original functionality not be removed, at least not yet - till the on object functionality matures.

Ideally, an option to highlight where the new formatting options are found in the on object version, when I choose it from the side bar would be very cool, and help me to migrate to the new way of working.

Most importantly, while I like formatting options being available with a right click, I do NOT like the field list there. I would strongly prefer to have that as it was, and for the right click menue to be only formatting, not choosing which columns/measures are in the visual. One of the reasons is that the width of the list is too narrow to see the entire name of the measure, which renders it useless.

Looking forward to the next iteration!

[Severofm]

For me, the ideal is that even after implementation (there is still a long way to go to progress and become usable), it is very important that the original method is maintained as the default option, as it is much faster to build.

[Janos]

I tried it again after the June update. I definitely see improvements. 
The ability to pin the Build pane is a welcome change. I actually managed to work with it on without making me turn it off right away - which happened with the previous iterations. 

What I like:
1. Ability to pin the panes
2. The real on-object formatting features (fill colors, title changes, etc.)

What I (still) don't like:
1. When using the pinned Build Visual pane, I can't drag-and-drop fields from the data pane.

2. Pinning the button is only a start, we need to be able to pin the pane itself (just like the filter pane). For some reason, the Right-click --> 'Open in new pane' option is sometimes grayed out and unavailable. Can't figure out why. 

3. Add or remove visual elements --> More options is seemingly useless. I haven't been able to find a scenario where anything happened by me clicking on it.

[QC]

Testing June update: I see some improvements, for example, allowing "Build a visual" pane to be pinned to side-pane, but user still can't see Data & Build-visual panes at the same time, making drag-drop data fields impossible. It forces users to Build pane, click on "add data" button, click again to add data fields. This is very redudant. 

Overall, the "On-object" feature is still very confusing and all-over the place even for experienced users like myself. It complicates everything, what used to be simple now needs more clicks. At the meantime, unlike well-implemented "right-click" functions in other office apps like Excel, "On-object" adds little to no value or dynamic commands that can't be easily done in Classic. 

In the end, I am not sure this new "feature" helps on-board new users more easily - if anything, it will do just the opposite.

Btw, the community has asked for many improvemnts, such as a Dark mode, adding column width control to table visual, or make hyperlink to table/matrix row header ... years past nothing happened yet, but MS choose to work on this one when no one seemed to have asked for it.

  

[Bella42]

I've turned it off for now, but great to see you guys are responding in real time, thanks 🙂 I look forward to the next releases.

[Joseph_Scott]

Hi,

I love the alternating background colors for values on certain visuals (ie: Table visual) but I lose this option if I want to do something simple like horizontally center values (done at the specific column formatting option).  Is this something that could be added as part of the On-Object Interaction, since it would feel intuitive to have the option to center all values within the visual when I'm interacting with the object?  

[LewisCoghlan]

Tried the feature for little over a week before turning it off again. Found it less intuitive and resulting in more clicks to do the same task. particularly less intuitive for selecting data for which I usually drag and drop. Not being able to see both data and formatting panes at the same time was a bit painful at times. 

[asdfasdf929]

In theory it's a good option to have, but I found the menu far too small/limiting and because it's not persistent, it ended up requiring a lot more clicks to keep opening it + scrolling to the section I needed to edit.

[elaine_dunwoody]

Where can I find the "Add futher analyses to your visual" pane gone to? I can't find it after switching to the new On-Object interaction feature. If it's still there, it's not obvious as it used to be. It's an important feature, and I like the ability to browse what analysis options I can add to the chosen visual.

[RosieL]

Hello, the analytics pane has been merged into the format pane now details from the blog post here