Have you ever tried to use your browser to zoom in on a visual in a Power BI report? If you simply published your report and then zoomed in, you might have experienced something like the video below.

With the default settings of the report, when you zoom in, only the menus around the report change. This is because of report responsiveness and the View setting. By default, reports are set to Fit to page. Power BI is refitting the report to the page every time you zoom.

Why would we need to zoom in?

There might be accessibility or compliance reasons to allow people to zoom in. For instance, WCAG 2.1 Success Criterion 1.4.4 states “Except for captions and images of text, text can be resized without assistive technology up to 200 percent without loss of content or functionality.” People with low vision or other vision impairments might benefit from the ability to zoom within a report page.

Another reason might be that a user simply wants to focus on one chart at a time. Power BI does have a Focus mode. Unfortunately, it currently does a poor job of increasing the font sizes on the visual that is in focus, often rendering it unhelpful.

What Are Our Other Options?

There are a couple of workarounds for users who need to zoom in on visuals.

1. We can set the report view — or teach users to set the report view — to Actual size. This then allows the browser zoom to work as anticipated. We probably don’t want to set all our reports to actual size because we would lose valuable screen real estate and diminish the experience for some users who don’t need to zoom. Having the report automatically fit to the user’s screen is usually helpful. But if users can change that setting as they need too, that might be ok. Here’s an example of how that works.

2. We can use assistive technology to zoom. Both Windows and MacOS have built-in magnifier functionality. The downside to this is that using it would not satisfy WCAG 2.1 Success Criterion 1.4.4. I think there is still some gray area/lack of expertise as far as how people are making data visualizations WCAG compliant because it’s part text and part image/shape (although it’s not rendered on the page as an image in Power BI). I’m usually more concerned that users get the information they need an have a good experience. But I want to note this in case you are trying to be WCAG compliant and might run into this issue. Here’s an example of using the magnifier in Windows. You can still use the interactivity in the report. And you can change the size of the magnification window and the level of magnification.

3. Zooming in on the report page with a touch screen works fine. If users have tablets or laptops with a touch screen, they can use their fingers to zoom and it will behave as expected. Here’s a video that shows that experience.

Those are all the workarounds I’m aware of, but I’m interested to hear how you have worked around this issue. If you have other suggestions please leave them in the comments.

I found an existing idea about increasing the text size within visuals in focus mode on Ideas.PowerBI.com. I’ve added my vote to it, and I hope you’ll do the same.

It’s common that users only have access to certain folders in an Azure Data Lake Storage container. These permissions are provided not through Azure RBAC (role-based access control) roles but through POSIX-like ACLs (access control lists).

The current Power BI documentation mentions only Azure RBAC roles, but it is possible to connect to a folder with permissions granted through ACLs.

You can manage ACLs through the Azure Storage Explorer application or in the Storage Explorer preview in the Azure Portal. As an example, I have a storage account with the hierarchical namespace enabled. In the container named filesystem1 is a folder called Test. Test contains 3 files, and I want a user to import Categories.csv into Power BI.

If I select the Test folder and then select Manage Access, I can see that an AAD user named Data Lake User has been granted access and default ACLs. Note that the user needs at least Read and Execute. Write isn’t necessary if they don’t need to change the file.

But with those permissions on the Test folder, I’m not able to connect to it from Power BI Desktop. If I try, I’ll get an error that says “Access to the resource is forbidden.”

This is because the user is missing some permissions. We need to grant Execute permissions on all parent folders up to the root (the container).

In this case, there is only one level above my Test folder. So I select the filesystem1 container, go to Manage Access, and grant it Execute permissions.

Note that changing the Default ACL on a parent does not affect the access ACL or default ACL of child items that already exist. So if you have existing subfolders and files to which users need access, you will need to grant access at each parent level because the default ACLs won’t apply.

Thanks to Gerhard Brueckl for noting that I needed Execute permissions on parent folders when I got stuck in testing.

If you find yourself hitting that access forbidden message in Power BI when accessing a file in ADLS Gen2, double check the user’s Execute permissions on the parent folders.

I’m excited to announce that something new is coming to the Power BI community in 2021: Workout Wednesday!

Workout Wednesday started in the Tableau community and is expanding to Power BI in the coming year. Workout Wednesdays present challenges to recreate a data-driven visualization as closely as possible. They are designed to help you improve your skills in Power BI and Tableau.

How You Can Participate

Watch for the Power BI challenge to be published on Wednesdays in 2021. The challenge will contain requirements and a dataset. Use the dataset to create the desired end result.

Then share your workout! You can post your workout to the Data Stories Gallery or your blog, or just share a public link. If you aren’t able to share a public link – perhaps because that option is disabled in your Power BI tenant or you don’t have a Power BI tenant– a gif, a video, or even some screenshots are just fine.

To formally participate: Post to Twitter using both the #WOW2021 and #PowerBI hashtags along with a link/image/video of your workout. Include a link to the challenge on the Workout Wednesday site. And please note the week number in your description, if possible.

Community Growth

I’m looking forward Workout Wednesdays for a couple of reasons. First, I think Power BI needs more love in the data visualization department. We need to be talking about effective visualization techniques and mature past ugly pie charts and tacky backgrounds. And I think Workout Wednesdays will help us individually grow those skills, but it will also foster more communication and sharing of ideas around data visualization in Power BI. That in turn will lead to more product enhancement ideas and conversations with the Power BI team, resulting in a better product and a stronger community.

Second, I’m also excited to see the crosspollination and cross-platform learning we will achieve by coming together as a data visualization community that isn’t focused on one single tool. There is a lot Tableau practitioners and Power BI practitioners can learn from each other.

Join Me In January

Keep an eye out on Twitter and the Workout Wednesday website for the first challenge coming January 6. While it would be great if you did the workout for every single week, don’t be concerned if you can’t participate every week. A solution will be posted about a week later, but nothing says you can’t go back and do workouts from previous weeks as your schedule allows.

I look forward to seeing all of your lovely Workout Wednesday solutions next year!

A while back I was chatting with Shannon Lindsay on Twitter. She shares lots of useful Power BI tips there. She shared her syntax tip of the & operator being used for concatenation and the && operator being used for boolean AND, which reminded me about implicit conversions and blanks in DAX.

Before you read the below tweet, see how many of these you can guess correctly:

Blank + 5 = ? 
Blank * 5 = ?
5 / Blank = ?
0 / Blank = ?

In DAX, Blank is converted to 0 in addition and subtraction.

What about boolean logic? Do you know the result of the following expressions?

AND(True(), Blank()) = ? 
OR(True(), Blank()) = ? 
AND(False(), Blank()) = ? 
AND(Blank(), Blank()) = ? 

You can see the results as well as a few more permutations in the screenshot below.

Why does this matter?

You need to understand the impact of blanks in your data. Do you really want to divide by zero when you are missing data? If you are performing a boolean AND, and your data is blank, are you ok with showing a result of False? Remember that your expression may produce undesired results rather than an error.

First, you need to be aware of where it is possible in your data to get a blank input. When you are writing your DAX measures, you may need to handle blanks. DAX offers the IFERROR() function to check if the result of an expression throws an error. There is also an ISBLANK() function that you can use to check for a blank value and a COALESCE() function to provide an alternate value when a blank value is detected.

But adding extra logic in your measures may have a performance impact. For example, the DIVIDE() function can handle divide by zero errors for you. But DIVIDE() may be slower than the / operator. The performance difference is highly dependent on your data. Alternatively, you can use an IF statement to check if an input value is greater than zero using the > operand. This can be quicker than checking for blanks or errors using other functions.

At the end of the day, producing the correct result is more important than fast performance, but we strive to achieve both. If you have any tips for handling blanks in DAX, please share them in the comments.