Power BI

Personalize visuals

When talking about Power BI, interactivity and interaction with report elements, as well as collaboration between users, are often mentioned as two central aspects of the product experience.
To these, one can certainly add personal productivity, which is all the more important for independent professionals or small to medium-sized businesses.

The Personalize this visual feature is one of the connecting links between the aspects mentioned, as it allows users to independently modify visuals and adapt them to their needs, without overwriting the published report.

This feature is available only in the Power BI Service. It must be enabled at the report level (either in Power BI Desktop before publishing or in the Power BI Service), with the option to decide whether to allow it for each page and each individual visual.

By clicking the icon of a specific visual, the user can:

  • Change the chart type, for example switching from a column chart to a pie chart.

  • Replace a measure (KPI) or a dimension (field).

  • Add or remove a measure (KPI) or a dimension (field).

  • Adjust colors, data labels, and titles.

  • Add or remove a legend.

  • Modify aggregations, for example to display the average of a KPI instead of the total.

With just a few clicks, users can create customized variations of the report without having to request changes from developers, while also avoiding interference with what their colleagues see. Furthermore, any modification applied is not permanent and remains active only for the duration of the current session.

Power BI also provides three different ways to reset visuals:

  • Reset all changes to a report: removes all user changes from the report and reloads the default view saved by the author during publishing.
  • Reset all changes to this visual (with a dedicated icon): resets all changes applied by the user to a specific visual.
  • Clear recent changes: fully equivalent to the option above but available within the customization menu, with the eraser icon.

On the other hand, if the user has reshare permissions, when sending the report link to others they can choose to include the applied modifications (again, without overwriting the author’s original version). If recipients also have edit permissions on the report, they can save the personalized version as a new report.

This feature integrates with Power BI bookmarks: users can save their changes and later return to the personalized view with a single click, without having to repeat any of the applied steps.

Potentially, a user who saves many personalized views via different bookmarks would have, for their own use (bringing back the theme of personal productivity), a set of variations they can apply to the original report—essentially, a report within the report.

In summary, there are two main advantages to this customization capability:

  1. Allowing viewer users without a Pro license to make meaningful customizations to reports, expanding the benefits of analysis.

  2. Allowing IT and developers to maintain a master version of a report alongside multiple user-level personalized variants, thus simplifying governance and ensuring consistency of corporate KPIs.

Author: Nicola Zanetti – HiBI PowerBI product specialist