Optimise Power BI Reports for Mobile

In this post, we’ll look at how you can improve the experience of Power BI Desktop Reports in Mobile Apps on Phones by creating a version of the report specifically for phone handsets.

Mobile reports are adaptations of your Desktop Reports which isolate, rearrange and resize visuals for an optimal experience. Mobile Reports use responsive visuals that resize well for viewing on a mobile handset and what’s more, you can add filters to your reports!

1. Enable the Mobile Report Canvas
2. Add Visuals to the Mobile Report Canvas
3. Resizing Visuals on the Mobile Report Canvas
4. Optimising Visuals for Any Screen Size
5. Other Considerations

1. Enable the Mobile Report Canvas

On the View tab, in the Reporting Section, select Phone Layout.

You’ll see a blank phone canvas. All of the visuals on the original report page are listed in the Visualisations pane on the right.

2. Add Visuals to the Mobile Report Canvas

To add a visual to the phone layout, drag it from the Visualisations pane to the phone canvas.

Phone reports use a grid layout. As you drag visuals to the mobile canvas, they snap to that grid.

You can add some or all the master report page visuals to the phone report page. You can add each visual only once.

3. Resizing Visuals on the Mobile Report Canvas

You can resize your visuals on the grid, as you would for tiles on dashboards and mobile dashboards.

Note: The phone report grid scales across phones of different sizes, so your report will look as good on small- and on large-screen phones.

4. Optimising Visuals for Any Screen Size

You can set the visuals in your dashboard or report to be responsive, to change dynamically to display the maximum amount of data and insight, no matter the screen size.

As a visual changes size, Power BI prioritises the data view, for example removing padding and moving the legend to the top of the visual automatically, so the visual remains informative even as it gets smaller.

Note: You can choose whether to turn on responsiveness for each visual. 

5. Other Considerations

• For reports with multiple pages, you can optimise all the pages or only a few.
• If you’ve defined a background colour for a report page, the phone report will have the same background colour.
• You can’t modify formatting settings for just the phone. Formatting is consistent between master and mobile layouts. For example, font sizes will be the same.
• To change a visual, such as changing its formatting, data set, filters, or any other attribute, return to the regular report authoring mode.
• Power BI provides default titles and page names for phone reports in the mobile app. If you’ve created text visuals for titles and page names in your report, consider not adding them to your phone reports.