We’re excited to bring you a new version of Power BI Report Server this winter! With the January 2022 update, we have a variety of new enhancements, including page and bookmarks navigators, new sorting options for legend, new formatting options for text, pie and donut chart rotations and many more. Please continue to read on!
- Page and Bookmark Navigators
- Sort legend
- New formatting options for text
- Pie and donut chart rotation
Reporting
Page and Bookmark Navigators
Previously, setting up a custom page or bookmark navigation experience in your report could be pretty time consuming because it required creators to setup each individual button for every page or bookmark and duplicate each button if they wanted to show a selected state. In this month’s release, we’re excited to announce two new built-in navigators to allow creators to quickly build page and bookmark navigation experiences with just a few clicks.
These new navigators should save creators hours of effort building and managing their page or bookmark navigation experiences.
You can find this new capability in Power BI Desktop within the Insert tab > Buttons > Navigator:
Page Navigator
When you select the Page navigator option, a page navigator will be automatically created for you:
The page navigator is automatically in-sync with your report pages, meaning:
- Titles of the buttons match the page display names
- Ordering of the buttons match the order of your report pages
- The selected button is the current page
- As you add or remove pages in your report, the navigator will automatically update
- As you rename pages, the titles of the buttons will automatically update
You have the option to Show/hide hidden pages or Show/hide tooltip pages.
Note that if you’re testing out the Page navigator in Desktop or edit mode of the Service, you’ll need to Ctrl + click to navigate to the desired page.
Bookmark Navigator
Before you create the bookmark navigator, you need to make sure you already have bookmarks created. Additionally, you should create separate bookmark groups if you plan on creating different bookmark navigators within the same report.
Once you’ve created your bookmarks and select the Bookmark navigator option, a bookmark navigator will be automatically created for you:
The bookmark navigator is automatically in-sync with your report bookmarks, meaning:
- Titles of the buttons match the bookmark display names
- Ordering of the buttons match the order of your report bookmarks
- The selected button is the last selected bookmark
- As you add or remove bookmarks in your report, the navigator will automatically update
- As you rename bookmarks, the titles of the buttons will automatically update
By default, All bookmarks will be shown in the bookmark navigator; however, you can create and select a specific bookmark group to only show the bookmarks within that group.
You also have the option to Allow deselection, meaning users can unselect the selected button in the bookmark navigator. This option is great for building a toggle-like experience or allowing for an unselected default state. To set up either of these types of experiences, you’ll need to first bookmark the desired unselected state. Here’s an example of an unselected state:
Once you have the unselected state bookmarked, you’ll need to turn on Allow deselection and select the bookmark that you want to Launch on deselection:
If the bookmark that you’re using for deselection is within the bookmark navigator already, you can choose to Hide the deselection bookmark within the navigator if you don’t want to show it:
Formatting options
Just like our other buttons, there are a ton of formatting options for the navigators including:- Fill
- Text
- Outline
- Shape
- Shape shadow
- Shape glow
- Rotation
- Grid layout
- Selected state
Grid layout tab includes options to change the Orientation of the navigator:
- Horizontal
- Vertical
- Grid
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It also includes the option to change the Padding between buttons in the navigator.
Selected state
The navigators have the option to customize the Selected state of the button. You can use this option to help the selected state of the button standout from the default state. In this example, we’ve customized both the Fill and Text formatting for the Selected state:
Sort legend
You can now adjust the sort direction for items in your legends! To control these, head into the context menu of the visual header, and select the field and sort direction in the sort legend flyout. This will also help to reorder some of the data in visuals like stacked column charts, as well as which lines or areas are rendered on top of others in other Cartesian charts. Note that currently, this feature only allows you to sort by the field in your legend field well.
New formatting options for text
Bold/italic/underline for text formatting
With this release, everywhere you see text formatting options like font family, font size, and color, you will find new options to allow you to bold, italicize, and underline that text as well. In the old formatting pane, this option will be three toggle switches:
These new options should show up in the formatting pane for text everywhere; let us know if you find anywhere that is not the case!
Text box super/subscript and bulleted lists
The text box has now been updated with three new formatting options: superscript, subscript, and bulleted lists. You can access them through the floating formatting pane. These allow you much greater flexibility with the content you include in your text boxes!
Pie and donut chart rotation
Currently, we begin drawing our pie and donut chart slices from a vertical line running up from the center of the pie. This also causes the final slices to be drawn approaching that vertical line from the opposite side:
While this creates for a visually intuitive pie chart, it can leave less room for data labels for the smaller slices, as text runs horizontally but the slices themselves are thin and stand up close to vertically. To help you in cases where maximizing that real estate is critical, we’ve introduced a new rotation option in the formatting pane to give you control over where we start drawing the pie. You can find that in the shapes card in the old formatting pane as “start angle” and in its own rotation card in the new formatting pane.
Modeling
SWITCH performance optimization
We have optimized the performance of the SWITCH function in DAX. You should see the improved performance if the SWITCH function has a large number of values (hundreds or more) or if the value expressions contain measure references.Bitwise functions in DAX
We have added new bitwise functions to DAX! Now you can perform common bitwise operations, such as shifting in DAX. We’ve added the following functions:- BITLSHIFT and BITRSHIFT which allow you to shift a number left or right by a specified number of bits respectively.
- BITAND, BITOR and BITXOR return a bitwise AND, OR or XOR of two numbers respectively.
Other
WebView2
We are switching a vital component of Power BI from CefSharp to WebView2. We’re making this switch to better optimize our development and release process (which means we’ll be able to spend more time developing new features!). It also means that you’ll automatically get the latest security patches as the WebView2 team ships them instead of waiting for us to update Power BI Desktop.This feature is turned on by default for the PBI desktop RS starting from this update.
Please refer to this blog post to learn more about how to install WebView2 if you have not done so already.
Also, please refer to the troubleshooting information available here in case you are having any issues.
And that’s all for our January 2022 release of Power BI Report Server! We hope that you enjoy these updates for this release. Please continue sending us your feedback, and don’t forget to vote for other features that you’d like to see in the Power BI.