Pro Power BI Theme Creation: JSON Stylesheets for Automated Dashboard Formatting, 2nd Edition

Use JSON theme files to standardize the look of Power BI dashboards and reports. This book shows how you can create theme files using the Power BI Desktop application to define high-level formatting attributes for dashboards as well as how to tailor detailed formatting specifications for individual dashboard elements in JSON files. Standardize the look of your dashboards and apply formatting consistently over all your reports. The techniques in this book provide you with tight control over the presentation of all aspects of the Power BI dashboards and reports that you create.

Power BI theme files use JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) as their structure, so the book includes a brief introduction to JSON as well as how it applies to Power BI themes. The book further includes a complete reference to all the current formatting definitions and JSON structures that are at your disposal for creating JSON theme files up to the May 2023 release of Power BI Desktop. Finally, the book includes dozens of theme files, from the simple to the most complex, that you can adopt and adapt to suit your own requirements.

What You Will Learn

• Produce designer output without manually formatting every individual visual in a Power BI dashboard
• Standardize presentation for families of dashboard types
• Switch presentation styles in a couple of clicks
• Save dozens, or hundreds, of hours laboriously formatting dashboards
• Define enterprise-wide presentation standards
• Retroactively apply standard styles to existing dashboards

Who This Book Is For

Power BI users who want to save time by defining standardized formatting for their dashboards and reports, IT professionals who want to create corporate standards of dashboard presentation, and marketing and communication specialists who want to set organizational standards for dashboard delivery.

About the Author

Adam Aspin is an independent business intelligence consultant based in the United Kingdom. He has worked with SQL Server for over 25 years, and now focuses on Power BI. During this time, he has developed several dozen BI and analytics systems based on the Microsoft BI product suite. Adam has been creating JSON theme files since the feature was first introduced in Power BI Desktop, and has delivered corporate Power BI themes for dozens of clients across Europe.

Adam is a graduate of Oxford University. He has applied his skills for a range of clients in finance, banking, utilities, telecoms, construction, and retail. He is the author of a number of Apress books: Pro Power BI Dashboard Creation; Pro DAX and Data Modeling in Power BI; Pro Data Mashup in Power BI; SQL Server Data Integration Recipes; Business Intelligence with SQL Server Reporting Services; High Impact Data Visualization in Excel with Power View, 3D Maps, Get and Transform and Power BI; and Data Mashup with Microsoft Excel Using Power Query and M.