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A summary of the new features in the July 2018 update to Power BI Desktop
Part four of a seven-part series of blogs

This month sees features allowing you to change the appearance of the icons at the top right of each visual, and also to change the appearance of the wallpaper surrounding a report, but otherwise all of the enhancements are fairly minor.

  1. New Features for the July 2018 Update of Power BI Desktop
  2. Visual headers (a new way to display visual titles)
  3. Wallpaper formatting
  4. Minor changes to tooltips, the formatting pane and slicers (this blog)
  5. Minor chart changes
  6. Changes to custom visuals
  7. Summary of features still waiting in preview

For a cumulative list of all of the updates to Power BI Desktop in the last few year or two, see this blog, or have a look at the Power BI courses that we run.

Posted by Andy Brown on 25 July 2018

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Minor changes to tooltips, the formatting pane and slicers

The July update includes the following minor changes:

  1. You can now turn tooltips on for tables and matrices.
  2. The formatting pane looks cleaner.
  3. You can access slicer choices using the keyboard.

These changes are explained under separate headings below.

Turning on/off tooltips for visuals

You can now enable tooltips for tables and matrices:

Tooltip for a table

If you'd forgotten (or never knew), this is what a tooltip looks like.

 

Here's how to turn this property on for a table or matrix (or off for any other visual):

Turning tooltips on

The Tooltip property.  By default it's turned off for a table or matrix, and on for any other visual.

 

The reason for this change is that Microsoft want to ensure that all visuals are treated equally for tooltips before the report page tooltips feature (currently in preview) goes live.

Nicer-looking formatting pane 

Here's what Microsoft have to say about this change:

Format pane changes

I love the personal touch! The only thing we don't get is her name ...

The changes are a big improvement (particularly putting titles above properties): 

New property

Having the headings above the property box makes everything much easier to read.

 

Irritatingly, there's still a bug in the Title property, which deselects the property when you first start typing into it.  More of an annoyance than anything else, it means you have to click back in the Title box.

Keyboard accessibility for slicers 

You can now use the keyboard to access slicer choices:

Slicer keyboard short-cuts

You can now press Ctrl + the right arrow key to access a slicer, and then Tab to move between choices.

 

I can't get these options to work, even after publishing a report and viewing it on Power BI Service, but perhaps that's because I don't have the required accessibility options set.

  1. New Features for the July 2018 Update of Power BI Desktop
  2. Visual headers (a new way to display visual titles)
  3. Wallpaper formatting
  4. Minor changes to tooltips, the formatting pane and slicers (this blog)
  5. Minor chart changes
  6. Changes to custom visuals
  7. Summary of features still waiting in preview
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