We put great emphasis on building delightful experiences in Power BI mobile apps. Our goal is to help you achieve maximum productivity by providing simple and intuitive data and insight consumption experiences.

But different people have different needs and habits, and the experience one person prefers and enjoys is not always as easy to use for someone else. Therefore, we have decided to put you in control and allow you to decide how some elements in the Power BI mobile app behave.

Introducing Interaction settings

Recently we’ve added a new section to mobile app settings called Interaction. This section has several items that you can configure to define how the app behaves:

• Single tap in reports (phone only): When single tap is turned on, you tap only once on a visual, button, or slicer to start interacting with its data. When single tap is turned off, you have to tap twice – once to select the visual and again to start interacting with its data.

• Docked report footer (phone only): Choose whether you want the report footer to stay fixed at the bottom of the report, or to hide and reappear based on your actions in the report, such as scrolling.
  If you choose to have the footer fixed, it will be hidden only when you view a report in full screen. In all other cases, it will always be visible on the screen, so all actions will be easily available for you.

• Report refresh (Android phone only): Choose how to refresh reports. You can either add a refresh button to the report header or use the pull-to-refresh action (pulling down slightly from top to bottom) in the report page.

Each setting has a default value, but you are in control! So if you prefer the footer to be dynamic, or you want to use pull down for report refresh, you can get your desired behavior simply by changing the defaults right there in the settings!

Multi-Select is also here!

As part of our work we also added support for multi-select in reports (phone and tablet). So now, in the interaction settings, you can turn on multi-select. When it is turned on, each tap you make on a data point in report is added to previously selected data points, and the combined result is highlighted across all visuals.  And what if you want to unselect a data point? Just tap it again.

Administrators can configure interaction settings on behalf of the users

We’ve also made it possible for IT administrators to configure these interaction settings remotely using their organization’s MDM tool of choice with the app config file. So, admins can choose how interactions should be for all their Power BI mobile users and configure the desired behavior for them.
Learn more about how admins can configure Power BI Mobile apps remotely.

Limitations

• Single tap and Report footer settings are available in phones only.
• Multi-select is not supported in Custom visuals.
• The refresh button setting is currently available only on Android phones.

What’s next?

We will be adding more options for you to configure how you want to use the Power BI mobile app, so be sure to check the monthly updates to learn about these new capabilities!

Please keep sending us your feedback, and don’t forget to vote for other features you’d like to see.

If you still don’t have the Power BI Mobile app installed on your mobile device, you can get it from App store, Google Play and Windows store.