Does the New Look #PowerBI Service use more or less report page screen real estate?
I have seen quite a lot of chatter with regards to the Power BI Service new look and feel, which I personally really like.
People were saying that whilst they like the look and feel, it appears to be taking up more real-estate screen space. As well as others preferring the tabs along the bottom like Excel does.
I took it upon myself to do a quick and possibly quite simple test to see if the new look and feel make the report page smaller or larger.
You can find details to the blog post here: Introducing the new look for Power BI Service
Below is the original report page
If I then measure the report page on my monitor which is 1403 x 808 (My monitor is running on a resolution of 1920 x 1080
If I look at my Paint.Net it shows me the page size of the report
Now when I do the same on the new look and feel my report page looks like the following below.
Once again, I take a screenshot of the report page and it is actually bigger it is now 1465 x 842
Paint.Net is showing the page size as confirmation
That works out to being 8% larger with the new look and feel! How awesome is that?
If I, then had to overlay the old page size on top of the new page size (In Power BI Yellow!) I can see how much bigger the new page size is.
It is amazing to see that even though it might feel smaller the reality is that it actually has more screen space, and I personally think it is much easier to navigate the report with the report tabs on the left-hand side. And I am certain that a lot of work and research when into the new look and feel.
Any comments are MOST welcome.
Thanks for reading.
Interestingly, I find the opposite to be true on my desktop monitor (1920×1200) – a little bit more height seems to reverse things. I get 1667×957 on a report in the old UI and 1488×857 in the new. That’s a sizeable 20% less real estatethan the old look!
Hi Ed,
That is really interesting, I did not test it on any other resolutions. It could quite possibly be like that. What happens if you collapse the menu on the left hand side?
Even more of a disparity (~22%). Btw, my previous tests have been with the filter pane expanded. With the filter pane collapsed, the new view is still 20% smaller with the left-hand menu expanded, but only 6% smaller with the left-hand menu collapsed. Still, smaller in every combination for me!
Hi Ed,
Yeah that is very interesting that for you it is even smaller. I wonder if it is due to the aspect ratio you are running on your monitor?
If you use the reports on full screen mode then there is a noticeable reduction in usable screen space
Hi Mark, yes it does look a little smaller
I did find that you can resize the tabs, which does make it a bit bigger!
Awesome! What size is your background image? And how about the adjust mode: normal, fit or fill?
On my case I had the opposite experience one bar chart graphic is adjusting and loosing the alignment on the month/year make it 45• degrees. Any suggestions? My best!
Hi there
What you could do, is if you dont want it to align in the X or Y Axis properties you can set how you want it to work in there?
1. The new look does not bother me as much as the Last Updated Field as it it really last updated from a data set being pushed. My data files actually have a true last updated (run pull form that data base. This new Last Updated WILL cause confusion for my users and I bet for other companies.
2. Not part of the newest look change, but the newer navigation bar on the left side does take up way to much space compared to tabs at the bottom or built in bookmarks. Sounds like there were many concerns even on Adam’s Youtube video
… i meant to say concerns in the Comments section (not in the video itself)
Hi Alan, yes that could potentially create confusion. I would suggest that the users are trained as to what the Last Updated means, is that the last time the dataset was updated vs what is the last run from the data.
With regards to the new look and feel I think that quite a few people have different opinions of the new look and feel, whilst it might take a little more space, to me I think it makes the navigation easier. Also if you use the App to view the report then there is more screen space.
Gilbert, I understand about training, but I hate that it is another thing you have to tell and “remind” users about as they did not remember. I know user training is important, but for many things keeping the information as simple (less unneeded data) as possible is important. I personally like the refresh information, but not for users. I wish there was a switch to turn it off. …. not looked on the ideas page to see if that suggestion has been made.
Yeah that is a really good point. It would be awesome for those features to be controlled to create less confusion for users.
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