We are super excited to announce that we've significantly updated the shapes in
Power BI. This update includes a lot more new shapes more formatting options a
new default styling and the ability to upgrade any old shapes within your report.
Before we dive into the details I want to give a big thank you to Ethan Nets he
was the contributor that helped build the shape component from the ground up.
This was his first time developing as a contributor for Power BI but we're
thrilled to say that he'll be joining as a full-time developer so you'll for sure
see more of his features in coming releases.
So now let's get started and see what's available with these new shapes.
To add these new shapes to your port simply
go to the insert tab in the ribbon and then select the shapes drop down.
Here you'll see a lot of shapes to choose from.
You have some common rectangle shapes,
basic shapes as well as block arrows.
So in this case I've added several different shapes
to kind of show you what's available as well as showing you the types of
formatting options available. So let's dive deeper in terms of the new
formatting capabilities. So a big one you'll notice
is that we've added text options. And this is really useful because we know that
in the past, in order to get text options on a shape you're essentially having to
create a shape and then you add a text box on top of it and we know that that
can be a real pain and it also adds more elements that you need to manage
on the report. So we've simplified that experience by adding a text formatting
option on the shape itself.
So you can access that in the format pane under text
and you'll have a lot of options here including font color text size font family
as well as some alignment and margin options. Next setting we want to look at is
rounded edges and even though we had rounded edges in the old shape visual.
In the previous experience, it was tied to the outline setting and that caused
some issues because let's say if you didn't want to have an outline but you still want
rounded edges that was not possible. However in the new experience
we've added this setting within the shape tab so that it's no longer tied to
whether or not you have the outline turned on.
Next thing we want to talk about is the shadow formatting.
So previously we just had shadow available for the entire visual container
but if you didn't have shapes that filled the full container,
the shadow would look not exactly encompassing the shape.
So in this case we've added a shadow that is available on the shape
and you can find this under the shadow tab right here and you'll be able to
control the color transparency blur and the preset as well.
Next similar to shadow we have a setting called glow and so in this case we can
open up this tab here called glue and it's very similar except you'll
see that glow is all around the shape like this and you can also customize
similar to shadow the transparency and blur.
And then the last formatting setting I want to talk about is rotation.
And before we also had rotation but
it didn't have a lot of granular control but in this new experience you'll be
able to control the rotation of the shape and text together as a whole
or just the shape or just the text alone and so that kind of gives you a lot more
granular control of the rotation of both the text and the shape.
The next I want to talk about is that we've also updated the default styling.
So let's say if you are changing the theme so I'm going to go ahead and
just pick some different theme colors uh you'll see that the styling of the
shapes have actually changed so they're attached to different parts of the
theme specifically uh your data colors um align with the shape
So you can see here if I'm you know changing the colors here uh the shapes
change differently uh compared to the old uh shape experience so the old
styling of the shapes. One more thing I want to touch on uh before
we move on to the next section is that when you have old shapes in your port
converting is very simple.
So in this case uh there's an older shape right here and you'll notice when I
click on it I have the option to convert this to the modern design.
So when I go ahead and click convert we'll get this dialog that asks me
if I want to upgrade all the shapes in this report at once,
I can check that if I just want to upgrade this shape I can click convert.
Also note that you can always multi-select shapes on the same page if you want
to convert multiple at the same time. So let's go ahead and convert notice that you
may need to readjust the shape after you've converted it because the
older shape did have a little bit of padding between the sides of the shape.
So that's it for the update on shapes we really hope that you like
uh this new capability and as always
we really appreciate any feedback that you have.