August's Power BI update includes vastly improved conditional formatting for data labels & some new settings to help improve Power BI performance!
Conditional formatting for data labels
When first introduced, conditional formatting for data labels was based on the full aggregate of the field across the whole visual, rather than at each data point. This caused all data labels in the visual to come out in the same colour.
From this month, conditional formatting on data labels for visuals with one or more measures and no field in the legend field well will now evaluate for data points. This example shows data labels for sales from this year coloured blue if sales grew above a certain threshold over last year, or red if they didn’t:
Conditional formatting options for these labels can be found in the formatting pane, under Data labels > Values > Colour. Conditional formatting rules can be set for all measures or for individual measures. Formatting set on individual measures takes precedence, so if explicitly setting a colour for data labels on all measures and subsequently adding a conditional formatting rule for just one, the conditional formatting rule will apply to that measure.
The conditional formatting rules for data labels already set on current reports will not be affected, and to take advantage of the update, edit the report on this version of Power BI and reapply the colour conditional formatting rule onto the relevant data labels.
In a future release, this same behaviour will be introduced to visuals where there is also a field in the Legend field well. In anticipation of the rest of this update, the conditional formatting button has been removed from the formatting pane for data labels in cases where you have a measure grouped by a legend field.
Look out for more improvements to visuals and visual formatting in future releases! Now that error bars have been brought to general availability, the Power BI visuals team have some exciting items lined up!
More ways to optimise the performance of Power BI reports
A while ago, the Power BI team introduced settings into Power BI Desktop that allowed for the optimization of Power Query query execution. This month, new settings have been added to influence the Power BI engine query execution. Together, these settings enable optimisation of the performance of Power BI while data is being imported or DirectQuery queries are being executed. For example, in cases where data import is taking too long, or DirectQuery queries are slow or slowing down source systems, these settings can help you optimize performance.
More information about these settings can be found in the Power BI documentation.
For the rest of the Power BI August 2022 update, click here, or if you would like to discuss Power BI for your business, email info@pt20.com.au or give us a call on +61 746 596 700.
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