Changes to themes and general formatting

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Autumn 2026 - a summary of recent changes to Power BI Desktop Part two of a six-part series of blogs
This blog shows the main changes which have been made to Power BI in the July, August, September and October updates, insofar as they affect report creators. Autumn 2026 - a summary of recent changes to Power BI Desktop Changes to themes and general formatting (this blog) Changes to slicers Changes to charts Changes to matrices Miscellaneous other changes to Power BI

Autumn 2026 - a summary of recent changes to Power BI Desktop

Part two of a six-part series of blogs

This blog shows the main changes which have been made to Power BI in the July, August, September and October updates, insofar as they affect report creators.

Autumn 2026 - a summary of recent changes to Power BI Desktop
Changes to themes and general formatting (this blog)
Changes to slicers
Changes to charts
Changes to matrices
Miscellaneous other changes to Power BI

Posted by Andy Brown on 22 October 2026

In this blog

The theme pane
Better subtitle and divider spacing options
Changing column widths by right-clicking

This blog summarises the changes made to themes and general formatting in Power BI updates from June through to October of this year (2026).

The theme pane

You've always been able to create and edit themes to control the default look of your reports, but now you can do this via a Power BI Desktop pane:

Click on Customize theme (as shown above) to go to changing your theme settings.

You can use the panel which appears in Power BI to create a new theme:

This Whizzy Wise Owl theme will be based on the Fluent 2 base colour scheme.

As one example, here we're specifying how the border and background colour of visuals that we create within this theme will appear:

All new visuals will have a pink background and red border.

So if we now create a new visual, it will look like this:

Pink, with red borders: exactly as predicted!

Themes can save you a lot for formatting time, and it's great that you can now customise them within a standard Power BI pane.

Better subtitle and divider spacing options

It's now easier to see the spacing used for your visual's title, subtitle and divider:

Here the title, subtitle and divider (the thick red line) are well spaced out.

Here are the options which control this:

You can see - and set - the spacing gap above each part of the title clearly.

Changing column widths by right-clicking

You can (yes!) change the width of a column by right-clicking on it:

Want a wider first column? You can now right-click on it to change the column width.

It's almost like you're now using Excel!

You can change the column width from the default size here.

I'm guessing that a change like this is easy to make in a desktop application like Excel, but much harder to make in a web-based one like Power BI Desktop: hence the long wait for this relatively simple feature.

Parts of this blog
Autumn 2026 - a summary of recent changes to Power BI Desktop Changes to themes and general formatting (this blog) Changes to slicers Changes to charts Changes to matrices Miscellaneous other changes to Power BI

Some other pages relevant to these blogs include:

You can also book hourly online consultancy for your time zone with one of our 7 expert trainers!

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The theme pane

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