New column and bar chart formatting options

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The December 2023 update to Power BI Desktop Part two of a four-part series of blogs
This update includes lots of updates to the formatting of bar/column charts, even more data label formatting options and better clustered bubble chart formatting for Azure Maps. The December 2023 update to Power BI Desktop New column and bar chart formatting options (this blog) New data label formatting options New Azure Maps clustering options for bubble layers We've been creating our idiosyncratic monthly blogs on Power BI updates since November 2016, and also deliver online and classroom Power BI courses.

The December 2023 update to Power BI Desktop

Part two of a four-part series of blogs

This update includes lots of updates to the formatting of bar/column charts, even more data label formatting options and better clustered bubble chart formatting for Azure Maps.

The December 2023 update to Power BI Desktop
New column and bar chart formatting options (this blog)
New data label formatting options
New Azure Maps clustering options for bubble layers

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 31 January 2024

In this blog

Formatting Bars or Columns Individually
Changing Bar/Column Spacing
New Ribbon Chart Formatting Options

There are a slew of new formatting options for bar, column and ribbon charts:

An example: in the bottom chart we've increased the spacing between data series and added a green semi-transparent background and green border for the Grasslands series only. None of this was possible before this update!

Formatting Bars or Columns Individually

You can now choose to which bar or column you want an extensive range of formatting options to apply:

Here we're formatting only the Grasslands bar.

You can then change a host of options:

Here we're setting the background colour to semi-transparent green and the border colour to a 2-pixel thick dark green border.

Notice that there's also a nice option for the border colour to match the bar colour, so you can set the background colour to (say) a semi-transparent purple and easily set the border colour to match this.

Changing Bar/Column Spacing

To do this you must first ensure you have all series selected:

This new Layout card consolidates lots of options previously on the Spacing card, but also allows you to space out your bars/columns by up to 5 pixels (or explode them in the same way as you can explode a pie chart's slices).

New Ribbon Chart Formatting Options

A ribbon chart is a variant of a bar/column chart, and so also gets new formatting options:

We have (somewhat unwisely) formatted the Grasslands ribbon within inches of its life.

Here are some of the optons for doing this:

The options are the same as the ones shown for bar/column charts above.

Note the bug: even though we've changed the series colour for Grassland, this is still showing up as unselected.

Parts of this blog
The December 2023 update to Power BI Desktop New column and bar chart formatting options (this blog) New data label formatting options New Azure Maps clustering options for bubble layers