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Power BI theme tip: Page Background

Ben Watt
Jul 28, 2020

Using Power BI themes has allowed me to keep look and feel consistent. This is important to me as I put a lot of time and effort into building a brand when delivering a solution for a customer.


I am going to blog separately about branding, but today is just a quick tip for one aspect of your reports to be consistent, and easily changeable across your reporting estate.


Page Backgrounds


I use page backgrounds for one purpose only, to place a discreet branded title bar for report titles and sometimes important meta data like last refresh or the current user.


Personally, I never use page background images to create layout templates. The reasons for this? Firstly, I can never get my visuals to be aligned exactly within the area as the visual is not aware of the boundaries of the background object. I simply use a shape object for that, and can easily align things exactly. Secondly, the re-use of these layouts is not high enough to warrant the effort.


Here are some screenshots of actual backgrounds I've implemented (slightly edited to remove customer info). My design skillz aren't great so you'll see they are all roughly the same. Less is more is my approach!

Better get to the the point


To keep this page background consistent, I use the below snippet of JSON in the Power BI theme so the page background is available on every page by default. 


"tableAccent":"#333333",
 "page": {
  "*": {
   "background": [{
    "transparency": 0,
    "image": {
     "name":"Image Wallpaper",
     "scaling":"Fit",
     "url": 
"https://lineoimagestore.blob.core.windows.net/publicimages/datalineo_page_background_617598.png"
     }
    }]
   }
 }
},

Here's a full theme file to get your started: Example Theme


In organisations where self-service users publish content, I share a Power BI Template file with a Power BI theme already applied. Rather than having to manually apply a page background on a page per page basis, this will apply it every time consistently.


The image is stored in a public-facing location, such as an Azure storage container with the public access level set to "Public read access for blobs only".


The benefits


Here's a few benefits from doing this.

  1. Using a theme in a Power BI template keeps reports branded consistently across the organisation.

  2. If I change the image at the source, then EVERY report that uses the theme will be updated! This is great for a scenario where branding changes, or a temporary colour change is needed such as a company celebration or endorsement.

  3. Every time the self-service user adds a new page, the image is already loaded.

  4. The image is not stored in your PBIX, saving a little bit of space (probably negligible really unless you're making whopping size images, don't do that!)


More from us


Would you like to see some of the other Power BI content we've published? Take a look at our Power BI Gallery page for loads of examples and links to all of the code



Further Reading


Microsoft Docs page on themes


Power BI themes gallery


Microsoft Docs page on Power BI templates


Microsoft Blog on branding your Power BI tenant


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