Changing the areas of a chart assigned to labels and bars

Two changes in one on this blog page: you can now change the axis label area as a proportion of the total chart, and also get bars or columns to appear closer together (or further apart).

Changing the size of the axis label area for a chart

Until this month, the only way in which you could read truncated axis labels was either  to increase the size of a chart or reduce the label font size:

Hmmm ... wonder what Arndale C... could mean?

You can now tell Power BI Desktop to put aside a larger percentage (up to 50%, in fact) of a chart for axis labels:

Change the Maximum size property of the chart.

For the setting above, here's what our chart would now show:

You can now read nearly all of the axis labels! You could now reduce the axis label font size (or make the chart bigger) to show all of the labels in full.

Note that the same feature works for X axis labels too:

You now have a better way to ensure that X axis labels are visible in full for a chart.

Changing the padding for bars and columns

You can now change the spacing between columns or bars:

These charts use 5%, 50% (the maximum) and 25% spacing respectively.

The way to do this is to change the Inner padding property of the chart's X-Axis (for a column chart, as above) or Y-Axis property category:

You can set this to any number between 0% (which looks silly, as there is no gap between the columns/bars) and 50%.

I'm sure this feature has been lifted from Excel!