If you build a report for an enterprise, you might be limited to use the organization-approved colors. It is also useful to have your reports following a template of colors, and fonts, which might look like your signature of the report. In Power BI, you can do that with Theme. In this article, I’ll explain what is the Power BI Theme, and how you can customize it.
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Colors and Fonts in Power BI
You can change the colors in a visual, or font properties simply by going to the Format tab of the visual.
Using the option above, you can change things as you wish. However, sometimes you might need to have a structure around it. You might want to set some of the colors as the main color, or choose specific font properties to apply on all visuals. That is when THEME can be helpful.
Power BI Theme
Power BI Theme is a pre-defined set of colors and font properties and a few other look and feels configurations that can be applied on multiple visuals. There are some built-in themes that you can choose from the View tab under Themes.
Switching to another built-in Theme
To switch to another built-in theme in Power BI, go to the View tab, and choose the theme you want under the Themes section.
By choosing any of the Themes, your visualization will adjust to the new look and feel;
You can always go back to the default theme by choosing the first Theme in the list.
Customize Theme
Choosing a built-in theme is nice, but most commonly, you want to customize the theme to change the main colors, fonts and other properties. This is possible by the Customize Theme.
Power BI has a nice graphical interface to customize the theme in the way you want it.
Customize Colors
You can set a name for the Theme, and change the main colors;
In most cases, when you are using organization-approved colors, you have a hex code for the colors, which you can enter, or you can pick a color you want. There are also more advanced options that you can explore and use.
Customize Fonts
There are also settings for the text font size, family, and color on visuals that you can specify.
Customize Visual properties
There are other configurations that you can specify for visuals, such as their border, background, tooltip (not a report-page tooltip), and header.
Page customization
The page’s background, or wallpaper can be also customized for a Theme.
Filter pane Customization
You can set the colors and fonts for the Filter pane, so that the filter pane of all pages looks the same.
After applying the changes you want, the Theme is best to be saved.
Saving a Theme for Re-Use
Customizing a Theme takes time, and you want to preserve the theme created so that you can re-use it in other files. Remember that a Theme has to be added to each Power BI separately. In order to save your Theme for future use, click on Save current Theme.
The Power BI Theme file will be a file with the extension of .JSON,
You can also edit the Theme file in a notepad++ or any other text editor later if you want. The graphical UI of Power BI Desktop helps you to edit that file in a simpler way actually.
Re-Use the Existing Theme
If you want to create a new Power BI file, or re-use the theme in another Power BI file, you need to Browse for the Theme file;
and you can choose the *.JSON file of the theme file.
Keep the Theme file in a shared location
Not every developer creates a theme file. One person in the organization might create that and then share it with others to re-use it. It is important that the Theme file is in a shared folder that is accessible for all Power BI report developers in the organization. Using this approach, they all follow the same template of look and feel for the Power BI report.
Reza is author of more than 14 books on Microsoft Business Intelligence, most of these books are published under Power BI category. Among these are books such as Power BI DAX Simplified, Pro Power BI Architecture, Power BI from Rookie to Rock Star, Power Query books series, Row-Level Security in Power BI and etc.
He is an International Speaker in Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft Business Applications Summit, Data Insight Summit, PASS Summit, SQL Saturday and SQL user groups. And He is a Microsoft Certified Trainer.
Reza’s passion is to help you find the best data solution, he is Data enthusiast.
His articles on different aspects of technologies, especially on MS BI, can be found on his blog: https://radacad.com/blog.