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The September update of Power BI finally breathes life into report page tooltips, which have been in limbo for a while. You can also copy data from Power BI reports by right-clicking, use some keyboard short-cuts for visual design, apply built-in themes, set fixed-width padding by column example and show categories on the X axis of scatter charts.
- Changes introduced in the September 2018 Power BI update
- Report page tooltips
- Copying values and records
- Keyboard short-cuts in Power BI Desktop (this blog)
- Built-in themes
- Column From Examples now allows for text padding
- Improvements to dot (scatter) charts
- Features awaiting in preview as of September 2018
For a cumulative list of all of the updates to Power BI Desktop since November 2016 see this blog, or have a look at the Power BI courses that we run.
Posted by Andy Brown on 21 September 2018
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Keyboard short-cuts in Power BI Desktop
I'm a bit of a keyboard enthusiast (my idea of a cheap thrill is discovering a new short-cut key in Excel), so I'm pleased to see Microsoft have introduced some short-cut keys to Power BI Desktop, with plans to roll out more.
They've actually done this to improve accessibility for people with disabilities, but I'm happy to accept the fringe benefits.
Keys you can press are:
| Keys | What they do |
|---|---|
| Tab, SHIFT + Tab | Move between sections |
| Left, up, right and down arrows | Move around sections |
| Enter, Space Bar | Change or choose things |
As an example, suppose you want to change the background colour of a visual starting from the field well:
|
|
| I want to go from here ... | ... to here. |
By my reckoning, here's how to do this!
- Press the right arrow to move to the paint roller tool, for formatting.
- Press the Tab key 15 times to go to the
Background section.
- Press the Enter key to turn
Background on.
- Press the Tab key to go to the Color
dropdown.
- Press Enter to select it.
- Press Tab to go to the first section.
- Press the arrow keys to choose a colour.
The behaviour of the Tab key is particularly unpredictable, as you'll see if you try to reproduce the above steps.
- Changes introduced in the September 2018 Power BI update
- Report page tooltips
- Copying values and records
- Keyboard short-cuts in Power BI Desktop (this blog)
- Built-in themes
- Column From Examples now allows for text padding
- Improvements to dot (scatter) charts
- Features awaiting in preview as of September 2018