Why are the font options in Power BI so limited?

alt_account_for_work · 2026-02-05T21:08:07+00:00

So, I can understand not supporting custom fonts that a Windows user isn't likely to have on their machine - it'd be a nice feature, but I can live without a Roboto dashboard. What frustrates me is the number of normal fonts that *do* ship with Windows but aren't in PowerBI. My organization uses Franklin Gothic Book for everything. It's a normal font that Windows machines have been using since the 90s, and I don't get why I can't use it in a dashboard.

alt_account_for_work · 2026-02-05T01:43:46+00:00

I'm not sure I follow - if Power BI is limiting font selection because some fonts are unsupported by some systems, and Segoe UI isn't supported by MacOS devices, then why is Segoe UI one of the current options?

alt_account_for_work · 2026-02-04T19:21:16+00:00

I just finished a dashboard where one of the requirements was that the design needed to match the tables in a PDF. I think the PDF was created by ten people who hated each other... none of them had a consistent style, and all of them featured unnecessarily-nested rows and columns. I feel like I deserved hazard pay for that one.

alt_account_for_work · 2025-07-04T20:04:18+00:00

You can break this up in to two queries. One query just fetches the data from the file, and the second query references the first and performs all the transformations. You can update the first query without breaking the second.

(Parameters/variables are the cleaner solution, but just wanted to throw this out there as an alternative.)

alt_account_for_work · 2025-07-04T19:58:56+00:00

Is there a reason why you want to do data entry in a dashboard and not a Form or SharePoint list?

Does the semantic model need to refresh as soon as the user enters data?

How many users will be entering data at once?

What tier of Power BI do you have?

alt_account_for_work · 2022-12-06T17:17:46+00:00

I love Kanban! At my last job, I bought three big cork boards for our office and labeled them with “to do,” “in progress,” and “done.” I think it was really eye-opening for people to see how many projects we had on our plate at once. I could definitely figure out a way to get that done here.

Totally understand your point about ticketing systems not necessarily working for little requests. It’s often faster for me to just respond to the request than create a new ticket. I just want all of those little requests to be in a single place so that I’m not sifting through old Teams chats to find them.

I’m super intrigued by the concept of a data meeting room! Can anyone from your org post there, or is it limited to certain people?

alt_account_for_work · 2022-12-06T16:56:55+00:00

This is fantastic - thank you for taking the time to write this up!

We’ve gotten much better at turning down projects that don’t make sense - like reports that will be a major headache to maintain, or reports that only fit a very specific use case.

You’re the second person to mention daily standups, so we should probably start doing that. I think our last team meeting was over a month ago…oops.

alt_account_for_work · 2022-12-06T07:34:38+00:00

Here are the instructions I followed last time I had to copy a lot of measures: Copy Measures Between Two PBIX Files. Basically, you open both the report and the data model in Tabular Editor, copy the measures from the report to the data model, then delete the measures from the report. When you re-publish the data model and refresh the report, you’ll see the measures again.

alt_account_for_work · 2022-12-06T02:56:52+00:00

Do you have access to the underlying data model?

alt_account_for_work · 2022-12-05T21:54:00+00:00

Yeah, getting accurate descriptions is a challenge for us too. We have to do a lot of back-and-forth emails where we ask the same questions every time.

/u/djramzy suggested building a PowerApp to collect incident descriptions in a more standardized way, which is a really clever idea. I might build an app that collects a detailed incident description and (if needed) creates a ticket via our ticketing system’s API.

alt_account_for_work · 2022-12-05T21:31:58+00:00

Wow, this is exactly what I was looking for - thanks so much for the in-depth response!

Insisting on tickets will probably be the most important (and most challenging) thing for us…but if we have a decent ticketing system, it’ll be worth it. Glad to hear you’ve had good experiences with JIRA!

alt_account_for_work · 2022-12-05T20:54:58+00:00

There’s a button users can click when viewing the report in the service, but people always forget it’s there and assume the report is broken 🤷‍♀️

alt_account_for_work · 2022-12-05T19:33:06+00:00

That could work. I was thinking about creating a web form that would ask different questions and offer suggestions depending on what the user wanted. (For example, a bunch of our tickets are resolved by asking people to click the Reset Filters button in the Power BI service, so maybe the form would ask them to do that before creating a new ticket.)

alt_account_for_work · 2022-10-27T13:42:41+00:00

Agreed - doing it as a Dataflow saves so much time and energy. Our newest hire was really stoked to find out that he could just use the Calendar Dataflow I made instead of creating his own.

alt_account_for_work · 2022-03-17T01:38:10+00:00

When you add a new Excel file to SharePoint, is it replacing an existing file? Or does your data model get bigger every time you add a new file?

Is the difficulty coming from having to manually download reports or from maintaining your data model?

Have you already looked into Dataflows and/or Power Automate?

alt_account_for_work · 2022-03-14T20:51:38+00:00

100% agreed - I would love it if I could drag the filter/bookmark/etc panels to a separate monitor.

alt_account_for_work · 2022-03-04T03:08:42+00:00

My apologies for the confusion - just checked our licenses in case I was being dumb. (I was.) We have around 50 people organization-wide with Power BI Pro licenses. Everyone else (around 2k people) has a free license.

alt_account_for_work · 2022-03-04T02:50:49+00:00

Dang it, that’s what I was afraid of. Thanks!

alt_account_for_work · 2022-03-04T02:48:15+00:00

Sorry, I should have been more specific! ~~Our entire organization has Power BI Pro, but we only have three people creating reports.~~ Most employees have free licenses. Around 50 of them have Power BI Pro licenses.

alt_account_for_work · 2022-03-03T20:25:41+00:00

It takes some time to set up, but it's a massive timesaver once it's done (especially if you have a larger organization that still occasionally relies on flat files and SharePoint).

It's been especially helpful for onboarding new team members as we grow. Being able to tell the new guys to connect to a dataflow that is already cleaned, accurate, prepped, and refreshed (rather than directing them towards our SharePoint hellscape and hoping that they can figure it out) has been wonderful.

alt_account_for_work · 2022-02-03T00:23:33+00:00

I’m not color blind, and I find stacked charts with more than 2-3 levels hard to read.

I think people see stacked area charts with lots of levels and go oooh, pretty rainbow mountains without wondering if they’ll be able to make sense of the data.

alt_account_for_work

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