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Power BI is packed with advanced features and capabilities that promise to advance your reporting. But often, it’s the little-known or overlooked tweaks that can save you the most time and frustration. Below are five practical tips that that I regularly come across and whilst they are not groundbreaking, can be very helpful to know are available.
1. Conditional Formatting on Line and Donut Visuals
Conditional formatting in Power BI typically relies on the "fx" option being available within the options of a visual, which you’ll see in some visuals like Clustered Column Charts, but not in others like Line or Donut Charts. However, that doesn’t mean you’re out of luck when it comes to color-coding elements of those visuals. Here’s the workaround:
1. As you can see below, we have no “fx” option for the line colour. So, let’s say you want to make markers on a Line Chart turn green for values above 0 and red for values below 0. If you don’t see the “fx” option in the Line Chart’s formatting options, don’t worry.
2. Start with a Visual That Does Have the "fx" option in the relevant place. You can pick a Clustered Column Chart, as you can see I did below.
3. Apply your conditional formatting by selecting "fx". As an example, I kept it simple and set the thresholds below 0 = red, above 0 = green.
4. Here is the magic, change the visualisation back to a Line Chart and hooray! We now have applied conditional formatting to the line colours even without the "fx" option being available.
Though it’s a simple technique, it’s incredibly useful and I’ve been using it for quite some time. You can apply the same approach to Donut Charts, even experimenting with gradient colour effects.
2. Tables with Only Measures Get Promoted
To my surprise, not many people know about this feature, so it absolutely makes the list. If you look at the example image, you’ll see that the Sales Fact table appears at the top of the Fields pane and features a calculator icon, unlike the default icon that other tables have. I love to joke that this is Power BI’s way of telling us it loves star schemas - FACT Tables!
Note: In my demo solution, I label tables with “dimension” and “fact” tags. I wouldn’t recommend doing this in a production environment - this is just a demo solution I use hence leave as they are.
So, why is this useful?
If you’re working in a self-service scenario, it’s much easier for end users to find where the measures live… right at the top. There’s also a broader conversation around using "empty measures tables" and add all measures, and even though that’s out of scope here I would just like to say… I am not for it 😉
How do we make it work?
Well, it’s fairly simple. Just hide all columns in a table and only have measures visible. This will push the table to the top with a calculator icon, indicating measures exist here. So, notice below, anything that is NOT a measure is HIDDEN. Plus, notice numerical columns that have the sigma symbol against them are NOT measures. They are referred to as implicit measures, hence I group them. Point is though, you must hide these and create measures for them for this to work.
Bonus Tip: Take advantage of folders to group related measures. It keeps everything organised and helps both you and your end users quickly find what they need.
3. Report-Level Tooltips
This is one that has been available in Power BI for quite some time now. But again, when I showcase this I see many people are wowed and wonder how it can be done.
So, we have standard tooltips available by default for all visuals as you can see below. When I hover over Midlands, I see the default tooltip.
Now, lets have a look at the report-level tooltips, also known as custom tooltips. Notice, when I hover over Midlands I now see a tooltip that is almost like a miniature report. The below is only an example, so if I hover over Midlands I see the daily breakdown foe the selected week. But, you can use these in very creative ways that offer genuine insights.
How do we make it work?
Well, create a new page in Power BI Desktop. Whilst having no items selected (just canvas), go to Format, Canvas settings, and select Tooltip as you can see below:
Then go to the visual you want to apply this to, select it, in Format select Tooltips, for Type select Report page, and then in the dropdown you will see the name of the page you marked as a tooltip.
4. Limit Slicers to Show Only Relevant Data
Many of you might say, “Just load the data you actually need.” And in many cases, I’d agree. For instance, in SQL, I’d use a CTE to return only the dimension items (descriptive columns) that have corresponding records in the fact. Think about customers, why load every historical customer row if you’re only ingesting transactions for the last two years?
However, sometimes you don’t have control over what data gets loaded. Often, you’re handed a pre-maintained calendar table that you can’t alter. So what’s the tip or trick here? Take a look at the screenshot below. We only have sales for 2024 and 2025, but the slicer still shows 2023 through 2026 from the calendar table.
If you only want to display years where you actually have sales, you can fix this in two quick steps:
1. Add the relevant measure (Sales, in this example) as a Visual-Level Filter on the slicer.
2. Set the measure filter to “Is Not Blank.”
That’s it! Now your slicer dynamically hides any years with no data, making it easier for end-users to find the meaningful options. No more sifting through empty or future years.
5. Sort by Multiple Columns
This one’s simple but still catches many people by surprise. You can sort a table by multiple columns in Power BI by holding down the Shift key. For example, if you want to sort first by Region, then by Store Name and by Sales, here’s how. Notice below, we have the arrows inside the column headers.
So, click the header of your first column (e.g. Region) to sort in ascending or descending order. Hold down Shift and click the header of your second column (e.g. Store Name) to apply a secondary sort. Lastly do the same for Sales column.
Summary
Hope you enjoyed these 5 tips/tricks. Again, while these five tips might not make Power BI headlines I often find many users are not aware of them.
Got questions or want help applying these tips in your own Power BI reports? We are always happy to chat or walk through a specific use case. Book your free consultation here:
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