The ‘new look’ of the Power BI service is evolving again based on your feedback during public preview and close to being the default experience for all users.
We’ve made navigation updates to give you more space to work with your content, provided options for report authors to configure their page navigation, updated the action bar for quicker access to common actions, and more. Please see updates and a recap of ‘new look’ below.
And thank you! Your feedback has been crucial during development of the ‘new look’. We’re excited to invite tenant admins to participate in an early opt-in of ‘new look’ for all of your users and share more feedback before we fully release ‘new look’ to all tenants and users. Details on the tenant early opt-in period and full release plan is provided below.
What’s new?
New simplified action bar
The action bar has been made simpler and organized so it’s easier to find related actions and putting most common actions front and center. These are updated for both reports and dashboards.
Page navigation settings
Report authors can choose where report page navigation sits, on the left as a pane or across the bottom as tabs. Go to File > Settings and find the setting under “Pages pane”.
Minimize global navigation and collapse left page navigation
To give you more room to view and interact with your reports, we have updated interactions to minimize the global navigation and collapse the left pages navigation. Clicking the global navigation hamburger icon will minimize the navigation pane to just show the navigation icons. When using the left page navigation within reports (as opposed to bottom tabs), clicking the pages icon arrows will collapse the navigation completely so you have more room to interact with content. The interaction is now similar to Power BI apps.
The updates above have been made in addition to the ‘new look’ improvements many users who have turned ‘new look on’ are enjoying.
Here’s a recap of all the existing ‘new look’ improvements:
- New workspaces: Easier to scan, find what you need, get data, search, take quick actions, and more. Read all about workspaces updates here.
- Updated personal bookmarks: Previously, selecting a personal bookmark would update the bread crumb in the top bar with the name of the bookmark. Moving forward, the bookmark name will be updated inline within the context of your report action bar.
- View report details: See details such as last refresh date and contact information quickly, right in the top banner.
- Vertical list of pages: Report page names are now in a list in a vertical pane. They’re prominent, hard to miss, and similar to navigation in Word and PowerPoint.
- Improved filter experience: Updates such as viewing applied filters and the new filters pane are available by default with the ‘new look’.
- Dashboard experience: Dashboards also have a simplified action bar, just like reports and apps, for a consistent experience, while retaining the functional differences.
Tenant early opt-in and release plan
Over the next few weeks the latest updates mentioned above will appear for users who have set the “New look on”. The action bar updates and pages navigation settings will go out first, soon followed by the ability to collapse the pages navigation.
At the end of September, the week of 9/28, a tenant admin setting will appear in the Admin portal under “Tenant settings” that will allow tenant admins to switch all users to the ‘new look’ and remove the old and new look toggle from the header. We’d like to hear feedback from tenants based on what you and your users experience as you try out ‘new look’ exclusively.
At the end of October all tenants and users will be moved to the ‘new look’ and the user-facing toggle will be removed from the header. The ease of use, more space for content, modern look, and familiarity with other Microsoft products that comes with ‘new look’ will be available to all!
Next steps
- Experience it for yourself! Head on over to Power BI service and check it out. Find the toggle in your top navigation bar and set it to “New look on”.
- Have comments, feedback, or ideas for next steps? We’d love to hear from you. You can vote on new feature ideas or discuss in forums, leave a comment below, or respond to in-product feedback prompts.
