A while ago, a client asked me to add a disclaimer to their Power BI report. As others have asked me to use it, I decided to write a quick tutorial to share with the community. Setting it up is fairly simple and should only take you a couple of minutes. After following the steps, the result should look like this;
Why Add a Disclaimer?
As any good data professional knows, it is important to inform the end-user on things like how the data was obtained or how it could/should be interpreted. While your report itself should inform and tell a story, it is often — if not always — useful to give some background information instead of just summarizing the numbers in nice visuals.
Using a disclaimer can help give context or background information without cluttering your report. Since I have started using it, I would recommend always anyone to add one as your client/end-user will thank you.
How To Build One
Adding this disclaimer to your report is not difficult. Following these 3 simple steps you can build it yourself.
Add The Button
For the UX, we will need to buttons; one to open and one to close the disclaimer.
To open the disclaimer you can simply use the built in “button” options (Format > Buttons > Information) from Power BI.
I personally prefer the button styled in the image below, placed in one of the reports corners.
Create the Disclaimer
Before adding the disclaimer, we will make it look like the rest of the report is fading out.
In order to obtain this effect add a rectangle shape (Format > Shapes > Rectangles) and make it cover the whole report. Now, apply the following style settings;
- No border
- Fill color: white
- Transparency: 30% (or whatever value you would prefer)
On top of this shape, now you can add a textbox. In my experience, it looks nice if the textbox fills a decent portion of the screen and has a white background with a thin black border or even a shadow. But obviously, you can style it to your preference.
Fill the textbox with the disclaimer (or other information) you would like to share with the user. In my case, it looks something like this;
Lastly, add yet another shape (Format > Shapes > Rectangles) but this time, make it fill the whole screen and set the transparency to 100%, making it so that you can’t even see it is there.
Configure the UX
Now all the elements are in place, we can configure the behavior by using bookmarks.
We will use two bookmarks;
- show disclaimer
- hide disclaimer
As (after adding the text box) the disclaimer is now visible, go to Bookmarks (View > Bookmakrs) and in the pane to right-click “Add”. Name the new bookmark “Show disclaimer”.
Now go to View > Selection and set the following elements to “insivible” (by clicking the eye).
- the textbox (containing the disclaimer)
- the transparent background (with around 30% transparancy)
- the transparent rectangle (with 100% transparency)
Go back to bookmarks and add new a bookmark with the name “Hide disclaimer”.
Ok so the bookmarks are in the place, now all that is left is to set the buttons.
You can attach a bookmark to an element (like a button or a shape), by selection the element and then expand the “Action” menu (after toggling it to “On”), set type to “bookmark” and select the bookmark you want.
In our case, we will create the following element/bookmark combinations;
- The “About this report” button -> Show Disclaimer bookmark
- The 100% transparent rectangle -> Hide this report
The last button will make it so that once the user views the disclaimer, they can click anywhere on the screen to make it disappear.
Be careful though, you need to follow these steps in the same order as described above. Otherwise, the order of elements (like transparant buttons) will not be correct and you would need to reorder them.
That’s it, you now have a fully functioning disclaimer with inuitive UX.
Conclusion
By combining bookmarks with transparent layers, Power BI offers creates possibilities for offering UX friendly solutions. By applying this solution you can quickly add additional background information to your reports without creating too much clutter.
Next Steps
After setting this up, I came up with two ideas that are a bit more advanced.
Automated Data Source
Instead of using a text box that contains the disclaimer information, you could also use a card. As the card fetches its contents from a data source, you can set up a source that is easily accessible/editable by an end-user like a .txt file hosted on a SharePoint, some Azure blob storage or any other shared space. This would make it for some one other than the developer creating the report to dynamically modify the content of the disclaimer without having to rely on a Power BI developer.
A Report Tutorial
The combination of bookmarks and transparent buttons could also be used to create an interactive tutoria on how to use the report. By creating a sequence of bookmarks, different elements of the report can be highlighted with annotations to guide new users through your report.
If at some point I do decide to implement these solutions, I’ll make sure to share them with the community.
About Me: My name is Bruno and I work as a data consultant. If you want to see the other stuff I built, like a mumble rap detector, make sure to take a look at my profile. Or connect with me via my website: https://www.zhongtron.me
