New data label formatting options

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The December 2023 update to Power BI Desktop Part three 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 New data label formatting options (this blog) 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 three 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
New data label formatting options (this blog)
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 the Title
Formatting the Value
Formatting the Details
Other Formatting

How much of your life do you want to devote to formatting your chart data labels? Not as much as Microsoft would like, we suspect:

Here each data label shows a Title, Value and Detail component.

It's great that Microsoft are providing new ways to format parts of a chart, but there is a line you can cross between ease-of-use and stuffing yet more options onto an already crowded formatting palette, and this author thinks that with this update Microsoft have crossed this line!

Formatting the Title

Here are the options chosen above for formatting the title of our data labels:

Notice that you can change the title (as we've done) to show any data field you like. Here we're showing the first (and only) centre type name for each bar.

Formatting the Value

The green values in our chart are given by this:

The values will appear in green.

Notice that we've used custom formatting to precede each value with the words Total sales, and to suffix it with units;

The custom formatting improves the appearance of our value.

Formatting the Details

The final (blue) part of our data label is an optional Details one:

Again we've used a custom formatting code to display something (in this case, the average price of sales for each centre type).

Other Formatting

Our chart also uses the following additional formatting:

The background of the data labels appears as orange, and the labels will occupy different lines.

What is really mind-blowing is that you can apply different data labels to each series of a chart, meaning that you could comfortably spend an entire morning just getting the data labels of one chart to look just right!

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