Power BI elements - a trick to make them work

There are many ways to display visualizations in Power BI.  PBI is a very powerful tool for visualizing large data sets.  The problem I have always run into is getting the "visuals" to display the way I want them to (read the way the customer wants them to).  For several months I labored over a specific problem and could not get the text to align with the data in the way my user wanted it (nor to my own satisfaction).

I saw someone else's creation, that did almost exactly what I was trying to do, and asked how they did it.  They told me how and I have improved upon it since.

So how to get that one visual to appear the way you want it to?  It is fairly simple.

Let's start backwards:

The finished product will look something like this:


  First, start with the the data you want to display, I used a card visual with no background (this the 142 number).  I combined this with a text object (Members in this case).  I used a generic image, a shape (a rectangle with a background), and a button (with or without a border) to create an action.


I positioned them the way I wanted them to look.  I then control clicked on each one and grouped together , renaming the group to Members (which is a subgroup of the SideButtons subgroup, which is a subgroup of the MainPage group). The selection pane in PBI looks like this after grouping them together:


Remember that in PBI the order of the selections is important.  Whichever is on top is in front of the selection below it.  In the above case, the shape is in the back and is the only one with the effects setting set to show a white background.  So in this case the background shows through.

This is the same screen capture from the beginning of this article.  The key to making this work is to get the components of the visual you wish to see and group them together in a specific order.  In my case, I wanted a clickable button that would display relevant information.  

The information is displayed by the card visual.  Because the visual did not display the text in the way I wanted it to, I used a text box.  The visual also did not have a good way to display an image, so I inserted an image file.  On top of that, I put a button with an action to make the button clickable.

If you are interested in PowerBI as a tool and learning more about it, the best resource I have found is the "Guy-in-a-Cube" youtube channel.

If you have enjoyed this article and want to know more about PowerBI, don't hesitate to ask.

Please do not forget to press the "Thumb's Up" button if you think this article was helpful and valuable for EE members.

It also provides me with positive feedback. Thank you!