There is a lot of discussion about how well Microsoft Power BI and Microsoft Excel compliment each other, and they really do, but I also find that Microsoft Power BI and Microsoft Power Point are also better together.
Power Point sometimes gets bad publicity but it is actually an amazing tool and in the right hands can produce excellent visuals that can support a presentation and help convey your message. This TED talk by David JP Phillips is one of my favourites and if you use Power Point, I can recommend this as worth a watch;
Many of the points David talks about are also relevant to Power BI. Power BI conveys a message to an audience in the same way that a Power Point presentation does and with every visual you should be considering what am I trying to convey, to whom, what do they want to know and what do they want to do the information. It’s also tempting to add in more, but just because it is possible to do it, it doesn’t mean that I should do it. Think of all of those lovely transitions in Power Point!!
In a practical way, I use Power Point to support my Power BI reports to give structure and meaning and hopefully a better understanding to the end user.
As an example, take this Insurance Applications Summary report;
The report has a background image from Power Point behind it which enables all the images and text to be added to the report without impacting the performance of the report. It takes a little bit of fiddling to get it right but is worth it.
Once you have all the images you want, roughly where you want them in Power Point, use Control A to select all images, then right click and save as a picture. I put the picture in the folder where I keep the reports and other resources. See Chris Hamill’s post for background inspiration and a step by step guide on how to create backgrounds, highly recommended, which you can find here.
Then you go into Power BI and navigate to page background, you add your image to the image section and need to ensure that the transparency is set to 0 and that the Image Fit is set to Fit.
Without background image:
It probably will not be right first time and will need some tinkering. I then go back to Power Point, make a few changes, and then resave and reload, and repeat until I am happy with the visual.
With background image:
I tend to do this at the end of the process but whilst I’m building the report I have a background colour for the page to help with colour matching.
Another quick tip: set the backgrounds on your visuals to off, titles to off and you can build the theme colours using either tips learnt from Enterprise DNA or PowerBi.tips theme generator which is also brilliant but that is subject of another blog.
Happy creating 😊