New features introduced in the May 2019 update of Power BI
Part four of a six-part series of blogs

There's not much new in this month's update. The Performance Analyzer is a great idea, for working out which bits of your report are running slowly, but all of the other changes are minor (as you'll see if you read this blog!).

  1. Changes to Power BI in the May 2019 Update
  2. Analysing the speed of Power BI reports
  3. Speeding up reports
  4. Small changes for line chart and KPI labels (this blog)
  5. Improvements to geolocation in ArcGIS Maps
  6. Features currently in preview for Power BI

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

Posted by Andy Brown on 20 May 2019

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Small changes for line chart and KPI labels

No major changes to visuals this month - just a couple of very specific updates to line charts and KPIs.

Setting the label position for line charts

When you have two or more line series which cross each other repeatedly, it can be difficult working out which units go with which points:

Data labels

Colouring your labels as brightly as this admittedly doesn't help!

You can improve matters by changing the position of each set of labels:

Label position

Choose to customise the labels for your series, then position one set over or under the other.

 

Here are the options:

Position options

You can set one series' labels to appear on top of another's, or underneath them.

 

And here's what you get for the example at the top of this page if you set Product A to be Under and Product B to be Above:

Labels above and under

Whether this is much clearer is debatable!

Formatting a KPI text indicator

The text on this KPI dominates it a bit:

KPI with text

A KPI, with a big text indicator.

 

Good news!  You can now change the text size:

Reducing the text size

Here I've reduced the text size from 45 points (the default) to 16 points.

 

Here's the same indicator with this new setting:

Smaller text indicator

The text doesn't dominate the landscape so much.

 

This is obviously nice, but isn't where I'd have started with KPIs!  Surely they need far more love than this (such as a feature to label the background mountain range)?

  1. Changes to Power BI in the May 2019 Update
  2. Analysing the speed of Power BI reports
  3. Speeding up reports
  4. Small changes for line chart and KPI labels (this blog)
  5. Improvements to geolocation in ArcGIS Maps
  6. Features currently in preview for Power BI
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