Data Bear’s Monday Motivation Blog Post

On today’s Monday Motivation blog, I am showing you how to use the Selection pane in Power BI to your advantage.

Where do you find the selection pane?

How to use the selection pane in Power BI

1. Select Visuals

Click on the visual on the selection pane, rather than the actual visual on the canvas.  You may ask why is this necessary, but trust me when you start layering, it can get tricky to select the correct visual on the canvas. For this problem using the selection pane is the perfect solution.

2. Hide and show visuals

When you start getting creative with bookmarks, you sometimes have buttons on the different bookmarks that need to have different actions. The appropriate button needs to be visible on the correct bookmark.  An example of this is a switch from 1 state to another, which looks like the same button, but they are 2 visuals layered, and for each state, a different switch needs to be visible. The selection pane in Power BI makes this easy.

Extra tip:  First create your 2 bookmarks, then hide the visual, then update the bookmark by clicking on the ellipses of the bookmark – do not click on the bookmark itself.

3. Rename Visuals

Get yourself organized by renaming your visuals.  By default, all textboxes will be named “text box” and all buttons will be named “button”.  Double click on the name, rename your visual to something that identifies the visual.

Warning:  Something to look out for.  When you copy and paste a visual, the name of the new visual is then the same as the original, remember to rename it.

4. Order visuals

So you may be familiar with the visual formatting tab at the top of the screen, that offers the actions to Bring Forward or Send Backwards.  This is a viable option of course, but it can be difficult to establish what order your visuals are in.  Use the selection pane in Power BI offers more control in this action.  Not only does it give you a view of the order, but it also allows you to simply drag the order of the visuals.

5. Group visuals

The same with the option to group visuals on the canvas.  Either drag over the visual you want to group, or multi-select by keeping your control button in.  Similarly, you can keep your ctrl button in and multi-select the visuals on the selection pane in Power BI, right-click, and group.

To see some tips on using the Selection pane in conjunction with Bookmarks, click here.

To see some examples of possible layering in Power BI reports see one of my previous blog posts here.

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