Power BI August 2020 Updates Perspectives for Personalised visuals in Preview

Personalised visuals have been out for a while (The ability for report consumers to change the visual to more suit their needs), but we need to make sure that users aren’t over whelmed by field options.

Lets look at a quick demo using Adventureworks data.

First of all, you need to make sure Personalised Views are enabled in Options

Enable Personalised views

Its not enough to turn the preview feature on. You have to enable it. for this example its going to be done in Power BI Desktop

Personalised visuals has been set up at current file level because there may be other reports that you don’t want to enable this on.

First of all create a simple visual

Note the new icon which denotes that it can be personalised.

This visual gets published up to your App Workspace. Then published to the Power BI App for your report consumers

If you have a lot of fields you might not want to overwhelm the users with them in Axis and Legend as above.

Tabular Editor

Back to Desktop and we can open up Tabular Editor (Ensure you have the latest version downloaded)

You are immediately connected to the tabular data model and can see the tables and the empty Perspectives folder.

Right click on Perspectives and choose New Perspective and name the perspective

Go to tables and fields then right click and add to perspective

When you Show an item in perspectives, it doesnt change the perspective. Which is a little annoying because you cant see what you have added. If you try adding the item again it will be greyed out which is the only way of knowing at this point.

• It would be helpful to see the list of items that you have added

Save in Tabular Editor and also in your Power BI desktop file

Back to Power BI Desktop

Without selecting a visual click on Format for the entire report

There is a new Personalize Visual menu item which can now be set to the perspective Created in Tabular Editor

Hopefully soon we will be able to select visuals to personalise and select perspectives at visual level rather than at report level to further lock down what should be seen per visual. This would be most helpful.

Save and Publish to Service and your user will only be able to work with those items in the perspective

Power BI Service

Now only items available in the perspective are available to the user

Future hopes for Personalised Visuals

• make it easier to see the list of items in the perspective in Tabular Editor
• Set Personalised at Visual level rather than report level
• It would be even better to have them set at Axis, Legend and Values level. You could make all measures available to the Values Perspective only which would be really helpful.

So a great start but I hope they introduce the functionality above to make this new functionality even better for our users