Future Proofing Power BI design alignment

I was a Data Engineer for a consulting company supporting a primary client’s sales team, with persons around the world, responsible with their data and reporting. A couple of times my team had to go find each of our Power BI Reports to make a change to keep them standardized. For example, legal makes a change to their notice statement located in the footer section. Or, the design team updates their acceptable logo (image). Another opportunity with this is to compose a standard message to all reports using the template.  This wouldn’t be an issue if we had 10 reports and a dashboard or 2 that are all centrally located. But with 70+ reports on Power BI Cloud, plus putting out a message to superusers who have created their own local reports based off of our templates (which we encouraged), this can be a huge undertaking.

There are probably many great solutions to this issue. But for most examples and descriptions, I don’t find centralizing the artifacts, that make up the design of reports, a concept that is used consistently. So this article is intended to show how I centralize many of those pieces. Once put together, a change in a single artifact will be distributed to all of the reports – keeping the reports consistent and in line with the companies’ ongoing expectations.

Some considerations before we start creating:

When starting a new project I have a couple of steps I start with before ingesting any data:

• On a drive that all types of report viewers have access to
  • Create a read only folder (I usually call it [Artifacts])
  • Place your company theme .json file there
    • If your marketing department doesn’t already have a theme file, you can create one at

https://themes.powerbi.tips/themes
Or Just customize your own theme within PBI Desktop on Design †> Customize Theme

• I also create a subfolder (inheriting read only status) generally called [Images]
  • I then copy versions of the companies’ logo, and other standard images, for report developers to use in the reporting.
    • Some considerations:
      • Image should be sized appropriately
      • Image types should be in jpg, png or svg (svg needs some additional service to make these work in Power BI – I will do a specific future article on this)
• Additionally, I create an excel (or csv) file that includes company wide information (note: I also usually make a report specific file that has specific information that stakeholders or superusers can edit).  I usually call this file [company_resource].  It usually looks something like:

• This should be very thin – limited to only information that is needed to create standardized reports and templates
• Normally the message & priority would be blank…

Power BI template files can be wonderful.  If you have not used a template file, you basically create a Power BI Report and then save it as a PBIT (template) file.  When developers or superusers want to create a new report, all they have to do is double-click on it and the Power BI report is automatically created – without being saved.  Developers and/or superusers just have to add details needed and save it.

The balancing point is how much to put into a template and what to leave out.  Should the dataset be added?  Should the measures be pre-created?  Depending on the client, I have created bare-bones templates through fully configured reports – where users just need to add messages.  This example is bare-bones.

Optimally, I would like to see Microsoft create a Header and Footer section that persist through each page… allowing for visualizations to be put on top –  like how MS Publisher and/or MS Word work.

Question: Do you centralize formatting and messaging?  How do you do it?  Let me know in the comments.
 

The following are details on how I set up a template file…

If you are already familiar with template setup you can skip to the bottom. 

setting up the Power BI template that developers and superusers should use:

• Open a blank Power BI report
• Go to Design top tab and choose Import theme – search for the .json file in the explorer window

• Ingest csv/excel file(s) that contain the company basic information (note: I transpose the data and promote headers in Power Query so it easier to access the data). I also pre-pend the table name with a “_” and hide the table to identify that this is data that I don’t want normal users being able to see it.

• Ingest images (Note: I will create a future article regarding how I handle images with Power BI)

Now we use this information to set up the Header and footer of our template pages.  I generally use the following steps:

For the header:

• Add a header background (keep as short vertically as possible to maximize the KPI/information space)
• Add logo (from table image, table URL, static URL, or importing image (not preferred)
• Add a textbox, format with Title as the Company Name and Subtitle as Company Tag Line (note: I don’t put any text in the box)
• For testing I added a manually created hidden table _TestingOnOff

• Create a slicer visual with single select “On” based on _TestingOnOff

• Create 3 measures for displaying company messages

CompanyWide Message = 
IF(MAX(_TestingOnOff[State]) = "On", "Testing Companywide message",
    SWITCH(MAX(_Company_Resource[CompanyWide Report Message priority])
       ,"High",MAX(_Company_Resource[CompanyWide Report Message])
       ,"Med",MAX(_Company_Resource[CompanyWide Report Message])
       ,"Low",MAX(_Company_Resource[CompanyWide Report Message])
       ,BLANK()
    )
)

CompanyWide Criticality txt color = 
IF(MAX(_TestingOnOff[State]) = "On", "Orange",
    SWITCH(MAX(_Company_Resource[CompanyWide Report Message priority])
        ,"low","Dark Green"
        ,"Med","Orange"
        ,"High","Red"
        ,BLANK()
    )
)

CompanyWide Criticality BG color = 
IF(MAX(_TestingOnOff[State]) = "On", "lavender",
    SWITCH(MAX(_Company_Resource[CompanyWide Report Message priority])
        ,"low","light Green"
        ,"Med","Yellow"
        ,"High","Pink"
        ,BLANK()
    )
)
//You can use tags from your .json - but I wanted dramatically different colors to really accentuate the issues

For the footer, do something similar… this is what I Usually do:
 

Section Panel

I organize my visuals using the selection pane.  It generally looks like:

The final solution would look something like:

Save as a template file

• From the top menu choose [file] > [Save] > choose folder location > Add “Name of your template”.pbix – this is so you can make changes to the template easily in the future
• From the top menu choose [file] > [Save as] > choose the folder  (I usually use the same as previous) > Change the [Save as type] to “Power BI Template files (*.pbit)”

Instructions

• Encourage your developers and superusers to use the template file as the base.
  • If they use the default colors, fonts, etc… the system will automatically update when updated and refreshed.

Put any questions, considerations or recommendations in the comments

Thanks,

John

Not covered:

• Adding templates and/or reports to GIT for version control. 
• Formatting for mobile layouts (phones, pads, etc…)