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Let users personalize visuals in a report

APPLIES TO: Power BI Desktop Power BI service

When you share a report with a broad audience, some of your users might want to see slightly different views of particular visuals. Maybe they'd want to swap what's on the axis, change the visual type, or add something to the tooltip. It's difficult to make one visual that satisfies everyone's requirements. By using this new capability, you can empower your business users to explore and personalize visuals, all in report reading view. They can adjust the visual the way they want and save it as a bookmark to come back to. They don't need to have edit permission for the report or go back to the report author for a change.

Screenshot of a personalized visual in Power BI.

What report users can change

This feature is ideal for report creators: You can enable basic exploration scenarios for your report readers. Your report readers gain further insights through ad hoc exploration of visuals on a Power BI report. Here are modifications that they can make:

  • Change the visualization type.
  • Swap out a measure or dimension.
  • Add or remove a legend.
  • Compare two or more measures.
  • Change aggregations, and more.

Not only does this feature allow for new exploration capabilities, it also includes ways for users to capture and share their changes:

  • Capture their changes.
  • Share their changes.
  • Reset all their changes for a report. Selecting Reset to default removes all personalizations.
  • Reset all their changes for a visual.
  • Clear out their recent changes.

After report readers personalize a report, they can create personal bookmarks to save their personalizations. To learn how report readers can use this feature, see Personalize visuals in your reports.

Enable personalization in a report

You can enable the feature in Power BI Desktop or the Power BI service. You can also enable it in embedded reports.

To enable the feature in Power BI Desktop, go to File > Options and settings > Options > Current file > Report settings. Select the Personalize visuals checkbox.

Screenshot of the Options dialog with the Personalize visuals checkbox selected.

Switch the feature on or off at a page or visual level

When you enable Personalize visuals for a report, all visuals in that report can be personalized. If you don't want all the visuals to be personalized, you can switch the setting on or off per page or per visual.

Personalize visual per page

Select the page tab. Then select Format in the Visualizations pane.

Screenshot of the menu to select Personalize visual for a page.

Slide Personalize visual > On or Off.

Personalize visual per visual

Select the visual. Then select Format > General > Header icons > Icons.

Screenshot of the Icons menu where you can select personalization.

Slide Personalize visual > On or Off.

Screenshot of the Personalize visual slider.

Use Perspectives for a more focused view

For Personalize visuals, use Perspectives to choose a subset of a model that provides a more focused view. Choosing a subset can be helpful when working with a large data model, allowing you to focus on a manageable subset of fields. Choosing a subset can also help to not overwhelm report readers with the full collection of fields in that large model.

Screenshot of the Personalize visuals options.

Keep the following considerations in mind when working with perspectives:

  • Perspectives aren't meant to be used as a security mechanism. They're a tool for providing a better end-user experience. All security for a perspective is inherited from the underlying model.

  • Perspectives in both tabular and multidimensional models are supported. However, for perspectives in multidimensional models, you can only set the perspective to be the same as the base cube for the report.

  • Before deleting a perspective from a model, check that the perspective isn't being used in the Personalize visuals experience.

To use Perspectives, you must enable Personalize visuals for the report. You also must create at least one Perspective that includes the dimensions and measures you want end-users to interact with for the Personalize visuals experience.

To create the perspective, use Tabular Editor, which you can download from the following location: Tabular Editor download.

After you install Tabular Editor, open your report in Power BI Desktop and launch Tabular Editor from the External Tools tab of the ribbon.

Screenshot of the Tabular Editor in the External Tools ribbon.

In Tabular Editor, right-click on Perspectives > Create > Perspective.

Screenshot of the Tabular Editor with Create and Perspective highlighted.

You can double-click the text to rename the perspective.

Screenshot of the perspective name highlighted for renaming.

Next, add fields to the perspective by opening the Tables folder in Tabular Editor. Then right-click on the fields you want to show in the perspective.

Screenshot of the Tabular Editor right-click menu with Shown in perspectives highlighted.

Repeat that process for each field you want to add to the perspective. You can't add duplicate fields in a perspective, so you can't add a field that you already added.

After you add all the fields you want, save your settings in both Tabular Editor and Power BI Desktop.

Screenshot of the Save perspectives settings in the Tabular Editor.

After you save the new perspective to the model and save the Power BI Desktop report, go to the Format pane for the page. You see a new section for Personalize visual.

Screenshot of the Personalize visual section in the Format pane.

The selection for Report-reader perspective is set to Default fields initially. When you select the dropdown arrow, you see the other Perspectives you created.

Screenshot of the dropdown arrow showing available perspectives.

After you set the Perspective for the report page, the Personalize visuals experience for that page is filtered to the selected Perspective. Select Apply to all pages to apply your Perspective setting to all existing pages in your report.

Screenshot of the Apply to all pages option for perspective settings.

Considerations and limitations

Be aware of the following limitations.

  • The feature isn't supported for publish to web.
  • Export to PowerPoint and PDF don't capture personalized visuals.
  • User explorations don't automatically persist. Encourage your report readers to save their views as personal bookmarks to capture their changes.
  • The Power BI mobile apps for iOS and Android tablets support this feature. The Power BI mobile apps for phones don't support this feature. However, any change to a visual you save in a personal bookmark while in the Power BI service is respected in all the Power BI mobile apps.