New features in the October 2017 update of Power BI Desktop
Part two of a three-part series of blogs

On the minus side, the changes introduced in this update (mainly a selection pane and spotlight facility) are tiny, but on the plus side there is a huge new feature (bookmarks) waiting in the wings in preview mode.

  1. New Power BI Desktop features in the October 2017 Update
  2. Use the Selection Pane to Toggle Visibility of Report Items (this blog)
  3. Spotlighting visualisations

For a cumulative list of all of the updates to Power BI Desktop in the last few months, see this blog.  Our two-day Power BI Desktop course always uses the latest version of the software.

Posted by Andy Brown on 09 October 2017

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Use the Selection Pane to Toggle Visibility of Report Items

Power BI Desktop now includes a Selection Pane toolbar, which you can enable as shown below:

Enabling selection pane

Tick this box to display the Selection Pane.

 

The selection pane opens alongside the field well, and allows you to specify to toggle the visibility of any part of a report:

Selection pane in action

You can specify for each visualisation or shape whether it should be visible or not.

 

An Example of Hiding/Displaying Parts of a Report

Let's suppose that you have a dashboard page like this:

Dashboard report

You want to be able to hide parts of this report.

 

Your aim is just to show the text box, image and two charts at the top:

The final view

You want to hide other parts of your report, but still have them available if need be.

 

Here's what the selection pane for this example might look like:

Selection pane example

Here we've hidden the gauge, KPI, map and surrounding rectangle.  What this shows is that you need to give your reports and charts sensible titles, so that you can locate them.

 

One thing to watch out for: hiding a slicer doesn't change the way it behaves (its filter choices will still apply), which could confuse your users if you're not careful!

  1. New Power BI Desktop features in the October 2017 Update
  2. Use the Selection Pane to Toggle Visibility of Report Items (this blog)
  3. Spotlighting visualisations
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