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Updates to Power BI Desktop - February 2022 Part three of a four-part series of blogs
The February update enables the big new formatting pane in Power BI by default, as well as introducing changes to mobile view and multi-row cards. Updates to Power BI Desktop - February 2022 The new formatting pane is now live (sort of) Mobile-optimised Reports and Mobile-Only Formatting (this blog) Multi card visuals now support visual interactions We've been creating our idiosyncratic monthly blogs on Power BI updates since November 2016, and also deliver online and classroom Power BI courses.

Updates to Power BI Desktop - February 2022

Part three of a four-part series of blogs

The February update enables the big new formatting pane in Power BI by default, as well as introducing changes to mobile view and multi-row cards.

Updates to Power BI Desktop - February 2022
The new formatting pane is now live (sort of)
Mobile-optimised Reports and Mobile-Only Formatting (this blog)
Multi card visuals now support visual interactions

We've been creating our idiosyncratic monthly blogs on Power BI updates since November 2016, and also deliver online and classroom Power BI courses.

Posted by Andy Brown on 18 February 2022

Mobile-optimised Reports and Mobile-Only Formatting

I don't normally mention features in preview (at least when they're turned off by default), but want to talk about this because it's a major strategy change for Power BI. You can now turn on the ability to make changes to a report specific to a mobile phone's view:

Choose File -> Options and Settings -> Options and tick the box shown above to enable this feature.

When you first go into Power BI with this feature enabled, you'll see this message:

A warning of what you've done!

You can now switch to mobile view for any report you're creating:

Click on this tool to switch to mobile layout.

This allows you to drag visuals onto your "mobile phone screen":

You can decide which visuals you want to include.

The big change is that you can now click on the visual you've added, and make design changes to it:

Here I'm going to turn the legend off for mobile view, because it's taking up too much room.

You now have two independent versions of this visual: changes that you make in normal view to this visual will no longer affect the version of the visual in mobile view.

If you view a report on your mobile phone in landscape view, it looks normal:

Notice that on this unambitious report the pie chart's legend is present.

However, if you rotate your phone to portrait view, it looks different:

I've only added one of the visuals to mobile view for this report, and have removed the legend for it.

This is a big strategy change: it means report developers may now have to create and maintain two completely separate views of every report. I think it's a bad decision by Microsoft!

Parts of this blog
Updates to Power BI Desktop - February 2022 The new formatting pane is now live (sort of) Mobile-optimised Reports and Mobile-Only Formatting (this blog) Multi card visuals now support visual interactions