Do NOT Create Your Design in Power BI! (here’s why)

[@kot23]

I beg to differ. My first steps with PBI design were like what you suggest in this video. Soon it became clear that having the "design" part created in a different tool had a huge overhead to maintain: requirements change all the time, pages are added and removed, visuals are resized, added or removed too. Having to go back to the external tool and make all those changes, then keeping .png/svg/jpg/whatevers in folders, was a real pain. And having to share those with other developers was the cherry on top. So, now we try to avoid externals as much as possible. We prefer simpler designs, just a filled box object here and there, nothing more. Easily resized and moved in PBI wihtout wasting time and resources for external tweaks.

[@mcnater]

This is the way

[@CesarGarciaJara]

I was thinking about that and the dynamic scaling of the report when you present in different screen sizes and resolutions.

[@stugryffin3619]

Depends on how fluid the design needs to be and how changeable user requirements are. Not just about the design. Maintainability also needs to be factored in.

[@mcnater]

100% this. At our org it’s a waste of time to do too much with design and backgrounds and etc.

[@roberttarpley7385]

Check out min 12:55 exactly what he said.

[@stugryffin3619]

@roberttarpley7385 just because we have a greater focus on efficiency and maintainability doesn't mean we don't care about design.

[@hirenthanki2932]

Great video as always. The only issue with this is that we have constantly changing requirements so you have to keep amending the background image. Also, the next developer is going to hate you once you leave if he or she was not given access to the background image.

[@mcnater]

This

[@RodrigoCalloni]

Great video and a bold statement that I would replace with… IT DEPENDS. if you are paying a third party to build your report then make sure they also provide you the Figma/PPT or Ai file. Why? The report is never finished. It will require support and if the change affects the background you are about to have to redo a ton of work.

[@Metalblowing]

honestly, I’m 1000% against non-BI design. I lead a team of 4 senior Bi devs. We ship reports for Fortune 500 companies on a weekly basis. The worst decision I ever made was to use PPT or Figma for a few of these projects. Requirements change often, context changes often, branding guides change often, and a ton of other things. Unless you want to be a 1 man army that spends 50% of time on drawing things instead of coding, be my guest. What you need to do is master data vizuization techniques. And nobody wants to talk about this because it’s hard and it takes years to understand how to make a bar chart shine for a specific context. Figma looks nice but doesn’t bring a fraction of value compared to those skills. Honestly, nice to have but be cautious of using it.

[@philipedesouzasantos1201]

Figma is only interesting if you are doing a completely standalone project imo

[@Wisewonder1]

Working as an expert from 4 years and all my clients or product owners wanted to get the design in power bi and whenever we suggested them a template that was in figma that was not accepted.

[@pedrogdiniz]

I'm seen the performance impact , but in this same case, the icons need to have a "button" function, and this has a penalty performance impact as well. So it depends heavily on the report you are doing

[@Turbo_PilotSky]

Working in a real world and having deadlines and lack of resources. I focus of reliability of data, testing and automating all manual tasks that goes into maintaining and responding to updating requirements as time passes , the poster like design is nice but the end users don’t care about fancy graphics, they need easy to follow interaction, well presented data insights and business rules calculations and less less clutter. Plus you need to cater for colour impaired users. If you are lucky to have team graphical designers to do all that , otherwise real world with 10 reports per week , switching between applications , adjusting all the shapes on the background , just not feasible

[@stugryffin3619]

Everyone needs to pay attention to this. This is the reality of working in analytics. While I love Bas' ingenuity and outside the box working with power BI, it is not feasible for a lot of real world scenarios for the reaons listed above. Only people who actually do this work for a living know this. That doesn't mean Bas brings no value. The point is the balance between efficiency, efficacy and ongoing servability needs to to assessed by every developer and it will be slightly different for every report.

[@CairgyMmapetla]

exactly. you said it in the most polite way possible. i did not have words honestly.

[@justlearnitquick]

Nailed it. Reliability of the data / having single source of truth, is really a challenge.

[@timzelle3549]

Thanks for another great video! How do you manage the quality of the images? Most often I have the challenge that the image becomes a bit blurry.

[@colinbuck2662]

You need to save your background files as svg (Scalable Vector Graphic) that should maintain the quality.

[@MayurV19]

One way would be to scale the background image you create on, say, figma by 2x or 3x. And then import it as a background in Power BI. That should help result in a sharp and high quality background image.

[@texmexdragon2160]

Agree with this in principle, but as others have mentioned, the real world changes that come up all the time make using a secondary tool more trouble than it is worth.

[@HowtoPowerBI]

sometimes it is, sometimes not

[@texmexdragon2160]

@@HowtoPowerBI Isn't that life in general! : )

[@user-bk8db7ud6k]

Enjoyed and appreciate the video but when Power BI is your job, and you are working for serious people, no one cares about the backgrounds. Time is better spent on the technical side of things, which you have many excellent videos about 👍

[@barttitulaerexcelbart9400]

Again, great video Bas! Of course many (including me) will rely on your authority if you argue that an external visualization method is better, but is very nice to see the proof with the loading times. I see many uses do not use the "compress picture" function in PPT, wich makes the file unnecessary large.

[@coffeeshop987]

Thank you for the video. However, how do you handle the switch to mobile version. You will need to create to separate designs and create two pages for one report (one for mobile version one for pc version) which will add complexity… Really curious how those who use external design handle the mobile version ?

[@avicamhi5311]

I am looking for a freelance Power BI designer (through Figma or equivalent) for a finance project. Reply if interested

[@alexandretoledo1708]

Excellent tip! I do not know a thing in Power BI, but have already gone into Affinity Designer so to enhance my visuals…great tip, thanks for the video! Hope I’ll get to learn how to manage the tool soon…thanks, once again!

[@rekha1611]

Great video but quick question, this will be useful for 16:9 ratio on report page size, how about custom page size. Which tool we can use ? Please advise

[@colinbuck2662]

You can simply customise the page size. I do it all the time in PowerPoint.

[@Eehonda_again]

From my POV, after the initial development iteration is done and signed off, optimisation activities like this are done and stay in place till the next version is published. But I still struggle with the json theme elements creating future versions as the basic one in PowerBi doesn't cover everything. An suggestions on a better alternative for those? Also, on a personal note I just wanted to say thank you for helping me learn PowerBi. I've been watching your videos for the last year or so and they've been really helpful.

[@rishabmacherla3326]

Now, you have added background image ,to reduce the load time of the report. But how do you add actions to the icons in the image ? We can’t multiple actions to a single image right? I guess again we need to make use of buttons near all the icons?

[@ThomasMcGreal]

My personal approach is in-line with advice given in the video. I create a single background image which includes the icons and load this into my report. Then I overlay completely transparent buttons over the icons and assign the necessary actions to these instead. That way the user believes they are clicking on the icon, but they are actually clicking on the transparent buttons.

[@rishavdogra7690]

@@ThomasMcGreal But the point is we anyway are placing transparent buttons, why not just also add Icon in the same button!

[@rishabmacherla3326]

@@rishavdogra7690 exactly my point!

[@rishabmacherla3326]

@@ThomasMcGreal when we are already adding transparent buttons, what if we add icons manually so that, the design change can also be made much easier without any complexity.

[@Mohamed-xt1fp]

Hi Bas,Thanks for this tip.is there any difference in performance for using filetypes such as png,jpeg,gif?

[@HowtoPowerBI]

Jpeg is usually smaller in size than png and png less than gif.. it is just about file size, make sure to always compress images

[@Mohamed-xt1fp]

@@HowtoPowerBI Thank you 😊

[@Awesome-kl1st]

Great work. I have a request, it would be great if you can provide some guidance for using Microsoft Charticulator.

[@theoffsideartist]

Can I connect to my Google sheet data to power bi Web version?

[@wozturner6999]

How does this affect resolution scalability across various setups?

[@aartdevletter5822]

Hi Bas, what do u do with dark backgrounds and focus mode? I use white fonts and then u can't see shit in the focus mode...

[@ajaaskelainen]

Thank you for the video! I was always thinking about this part of the report

[@angelicamusoke9067]

Your videos have helped me improve my dashboards by so much! Thank you ❤️!

[@iDarkSn0w]

How would you make the sidebar icons clickable if it is only one image exported from another program? I'm new to Power BI, sorry if this question sounds dumb

[@HowtoPowerBI]

you overlap a page navigation (insert -> buttons -> nav ) and change the formatting to full transparency

[@iDarkSn0w]

@@HowtoPowerBI thank you :)

[@vittoriogiatti9050]

I don't agree. Everything you do in figma should be replicable with PBI objects. There already many components and tricks to create something that gives a nice ux feeling. People is more and more trying to make PBI a front end tool that looks like a fancy website made from a graphic designer. But I don't agree with it, it works only in a few situations, and it may work if u are a real bi professional, if u are an hybrid like data science + bi, it simply doesn't stand with your daily routine. This figma thing only works for a specific and well closed requirement, because if you are creating a data product where each increment you add more and more features, the design keep changing. So it is better to keep the normal tab to navigate through the pages, instead that use icon buttons.

[@Young_Santana808]

I had a mission like this. And oh my god it was awful using figma. everytime for a little update i had to go to figma.

[@MarcoACto]

I think it really depends and I often see people doing everything on Figma that really shouldn’t. What’s the point of creating a chart placeholder in figma if you can just use the standard background color, border and title of said chart to achieve the exact same result? The chart is getting rendered anyway. Now, if you’re creating shapes just to create shapes, then I agree.

[@DeepakChauhan-mn5jw]

Query - how do we design for custom page size? Eg: if the page size is 1200*1200, the powerpoint design does not set in nicely.

[@nishantdhir570]

Thank you so much for such informative video. I was searching for such videos to improve my design skill in Power BI.

[@sanchowitfurrows1561]

I feel it this video compares apples to oranges despite all efforts put into quantitative analysis. I expected both "Native shapes" and "Background" alternatives have, besides the same look, also the same behavior. What the point of having left panel icons that don't react on clicks?

[@mrTonYT987]

thanks again for a great video! i will definitely implement the learnings right away on my own reports. 💪

[@HowtoPowerBI]

have fun 😁 , keep in mind I'm not saying in this video I would always go for a background created outside of Power BI, it is tradeoff between speed + more design options vs. the ease of being able to make changes within Power BI

[@MuhammadSalama-yr3wq]

How do you make then the menu bar interactive if the background is image and includes the menu icons ?

[@jansandoval3651]

You place buttons on top of the menu icons and make the buttons transparent. Then assign them an action in the “style” pane

[@MuhammadSalama-yr3wq]

@@jansandoval3651 Oaky, got it. Thanks a lot bro

[@DanielWeikert]

what about png and distortions ?

[@RewinWilson]

Hello Friends, assuming that all of you must be pro users at BI, i am just starting my journey with Power BI. Could you please let me know a good site to access and download icons for report creation? I do know of lord icon which makes icon gifs, but wanted to know if there are any other free ones....Appreciate your support. and TIA

[@Im_Thanos]

The effort seems to be more than to create that using power bi..! If a small change has to happen the entire UI has to be redone rather than moving a card from up to down in power bi itself.

[@ahmedshalaby9343]

you need to make a playlist how to tune the performance

[@ThomasMcGreal]

I think a number of commentators maybe misconstruing the message of the video. As Bas alluded to towards the end there are a number of scenarios where this approach isn't feasible, as a number of people have given examples. As data experts we are all aware there is never a 'one-size-fits-all' approach to data analysis and visualisation and, while some concepts and ideas may form a basis for a standardised approach, we will all at times move away from this. If every approach like this worked for every scenario then I imagine a lot of us would find ourselves out of a job. My personal experience, is that numerous time I have to adopt to a standardised approach in terms of report design, which also has to be adopted by others in the team. Items such as colour, placement, text etc all have to adhere to strict branding. Utilising the process in the video and themes makes this task a lot easier, with the loading speed being a very happy side effect. Thank you for another very useful video!

[@WornOutEXT]

Using other software is a huge headache. Can't believe we have to switch back and forth between software for a report design....

[@charlesallen4821]

You don't have to. He's suggesting you'll have better-looking reports. You may use multiple products together, like Excel and Word.

[@MBARKT3STO]

The first time in my entire life I comment on a KZbin video, I want to saay massive thanks for this informative video, I only want to ask if could you please share with us some link or websites to find that kind of images/backgrounds??? And massive thanks again with all respect and love

[@HowtoPowerBI]

datatraining.io/course?courseid=designdarkmint

[@HowtoPowerBI]

thx a lot for getting your first comment ever!!! 😁

[@atulbihari7473]

Eagerly waiting for your video.😊

[@wujek-piotrek]

It's quite funny that you talk about performance when in every single video you create numerous measures to achieve good-looking charts, but you sacrifice loading speed in the process.At the very beginning, I was a big fan of creating backgrounds in Figma. However, I quickly realized that having to change them based on every customer's review in an external tool was simply too annoying.Plus, now my report is responsive on mobile :)We have to say, sometimes the simplest things in Power BI aren't easy to achieve without resorting to tricks, and that's a shame on Microsoft.

[@chrism9037]

Thanks Bas, this was excellent!

[@AhmedCherif-mt5lb]

You are the best ❤❤

[@edwinarchico439]

, thank you bas for the video

[@HowtoPowerBI]

thanks for always watching them Edwin! 😁

[@darshanapatel1260]

This could have been explained without referring to Performance Analyzer

[@HowtoPowerBI]

How

[@PeterKontogeorgis]

@@HowtoPowerBI Telepathy 🤣🤣🤣

[@julianomateus2935]

TKS

[@ahmedantar9114]

Thanks for great tutorials , i've question how i change basic layout of power bi desktop to this look as you using at : ( kzbin.info/www/bejne/maDEqniabt6Mobs)

[@AizenDoza]

[@HowtoPowerBI]

😎👊

[@richardcroft3676]

Hey, let’s over-engineer the layout, detract from the actual message in the data and store up all that tech debt for when we inevitably need to flex the design. Sorry but it’s not for me.

[@Wzxxx]

If they only let us create leyers which u can block would be much better. If u use blp image as a background there is always some resolution degradation