Formatting Visuals in Power BI Formatting can mean lots of things. It can be about the labels such as the chart titles, the axis titles, or even the legend settings can be about the color. So color of your bar chart or your column chart, it can be the page color or background can even be the position or the alignment of your visuals and it can also allow you to add borders or gridlines to the visual.

Formatting is a really important part of Power BI because it will make such a difference to the end result and how your audience interpret it. So, for example, we have a poorly formatted chart here in many different ways. The axis labeling could be a little bit better. There are quite a lot of values on the axes. We have a lot of additional markers on the lines and we don't really have a good chart title explaining what this chart is about.

If we make some simple formatting changes such as putting in a much better title, changing the axis labels a little bit, even applying some color coding we get a chart which is much easier to understand.

Here we have a dashboard. And again, this is an example of a poorly formatted one when we bring lots of visuals together in the one place. It's not just about the formatting of each individual visual, but it's how they sit together on the page.

So the alignment of the visuals is important, the correct labeling, the colors, and the sizing, and uniformity and structure is what we're looking for consistency in all of these things.

So if we work with the formatting of a dashboard we get much more uniformity and structure much easier for our audience to understand.

We have realigned, we've positioned, we've worked with the coloring and the sizing of the visuals is the same. Much easier for the audience. Let's do a workout and see how to do some formatting in Power BI.

So I'm using Get Data to connect to an Excel workbook and just going to select this one here module 2 lesson 4c.

And I'll create one or two visuals and then we'll see where to format them. So I load my data into the report.

And I'll create a column chart just using the market USD value field. So if I open my table list here, I'll select market value and asset class 1.

Just bring that on to the page.

I just click on to the canvas and I'll create a pie chart, so I'll use market value again.

And I'll use nominal currency.

And I'll drag it onto the page and then convert it to a pie chart. There we go. Lovely.

So now you to do some formatting with these visuals. First of all, when I format I must select the visual that I want to apply the formatting to so I have my pie chart selected here at the minute. So on the visualizations pane in the center, we have an icon to allow me to format whatever visual I have selected. So if I just click on that, it will change the panel and give me lots of formatting options. Now, it's split into two sections, there's the visual section and then there's some general settings as well. So for example, if I want to change my chart title, I would go in here to title each section could be expanded. I can see that there's already a chart title on it has given me one by default, but I'm going to change that ever so slightly just to update it. So I'll just do USD value percentage market there we go. I'm going to make me make it size 16, and I'm going to center a lineup.

There we go.

Now, we mentioned earlier that consistency is important. So if I'm Center aligning a heading or a chart title, and I'm changing it to size 16 on one visual. It's best that I do that for all the visuals.

So I can select my column chart here. And if I go to the formatting in there and go to General I can see I also have a Title section here, so I'm just going to click on that open it up and I can change the title if I want or in this case, I'll just go down and set it to size 16 and I'll set it to center aligned as well.

Some of the other formatting features that we have and if I select my pie chart again, I can go to the formatting and this time to the visual section where I can get right into for example, the legend, the legend remember on a pie chart is the grouping so I've grouped nominal currency.

So if I open up Legend, I'm going to change it so it sits at the top so I'm changing it to top center there.

I'm also going to change on my pie chart the detail labels. So the detail labels at the minute show me the percentage and the value. So if I open that up, I'm just going to change that. So it only shows me the percentage.

Very easy to make these changes. Sometimes it's a little difficult to remember where they are, but it's just a matter of opening each section and exploring what is in there.

Let's just go back to my column chart. I'll make one other adjustment there on my column.

I'm going to take some of the labeling off. There's a little bit of extra labeling on my axes here, which I maybe don't need so I'm going to keep my column chart selected.

I want to keep the axes on I just want to remove the title of the axes. So if I open it up and scroll down a little bit we can see here that the title is currently on so I'm just going to turn that off. There we go, and we just have the axes with the levels.

The last thing I'm going to do is apply some color and I'm going to use a theme for that. So a theme is available on The View Tab and on the View tab here, if I open up my theme gallery I get a selection of themes, a theme is just a collection of font colors and styles. So we have classic, we have electric, all different themes here. I'm just going to go for high rise and you can see immediately all my visuals have updated to using that particular theme. Great way to very quickly and easily update your visuals and keep the colors consistent.

Let's just make one more formatting change. I'm going to select my column chart.

And on the formatting section here go down to General and under effects, I can put a border around it. So I'm just going to tick visual border on.

And then I'll do the same for my pie chart. So I'm just going to copy the formatting rather than go back into the format visual and hunt for the visual border for the pie chart. If I select my column chart click on Home tab and painter I can just click once on the pie chart and it gets the border as well. Now. I have done that it's really important that I size the visuals exactly the same so you can see the little red markers here as I reposition and resize. Just to make sure that we again have that uniformity and consistency.

To finish off my page I'm going to add in a text box. Text boxes are a great ways to add a label to the page, so I'm just going to use my insert tab here and text box. I'm going to put in a heading so I'll just put in some heading here financial analysis.

That's a little bit small. So I'm just going to select it here and then I will.

Increase the size maybe bring it up to size 32. I'll put it in bold and center a line. And then that's all that's left from an eye is really just to resize that across the top and I have a little bit of text there which explains what my visual is all about.