Customize Current Theme From Power BI Desktop Without Using JSON

Overview

In this article, we will talk about how we can customize the current Power BI report theme in Power BI. Power BI launched this amazing feature in its December 2019 update.

For detailed information about this new feature, I have divided this article into two parts.

During the first part of the series, we will be talking about a few properties only. In the second part of the article, we will talk about the other properties in brief.

Below is the information about the links for the articles.

Now, let’s explore how we can customize the current report theme.

Practice files

For your practice, I have uploaded the sample Power BI file to the GitHub repository. You can directly download the file from there.

Prerequisite

Make sure that you have installed Power BI Desktop with the latest version of December 2019.
Enable the Preview feature.

To enable preview features, please follow the below steps,

Go to File, From Options and Settings, select Options.

Options

From the Preview features, select “Customize current theme”.

Preview features

Restart the Power BI Desktop.

Overview of Sample Power BI Report

Below is the screen for the Power BI report that we have developed. The report has one bar chart, one line chart, one table, donut chart, slicer and funnel chart.

Overview of sample Power BI report

We haven’t defined any report theme at this moment.

Now, let’s define the theme for the current report.

Step 1. Go to View Menu, select Customize current theme

View

Step 2. This will open the following pop-up.

The theme pop-up is divided into 5 different options.

Customize theme

Name and colors
Text
Visuals
Page
Filter pane

Now, let’s explore each of the options in brief.

Name and colors

This property has two sub-options

Name and colors
Advanced

Name and colors

Name

First, we need to provide the name of the theme. Let’s say we have created a theme named “SampleTheme”.

We can set

Theme colors
Sentiment colors
Divergent colors

From the options.

Theme colors

We can set eight(8) different theme colors considering different data colors used for different charts, lines, etc.

Sentiment colors

This can be used to indicate KPI visuals as well as to represent positive and negative numbers for waterfall charts and to show positive, neutral, and negative results.

Divergent colors

This can be used to represent conditional formatting to represent where data points fall in a range.

Now, let’s change some theme colors and check the results.

We have changed the first three colors.

Apply and save

Click on Apply and save

Here is the output.

Output

Advanced

When we look at the Advanced property, we have the following options.

First-level elements
Second-level elements
Third-level elements
Fourth-level elements
Background elements
Secondary background elements

Purpose

The main purpose of these options is to choose colors for different elements in our visuals like,

Axis Gridline
Textbox font
First-level fonts etc.

Now, let’s apply a few of the categories and check the result.

First level element

Now, let’s change the color for the first-level elements and second-level elements.

Click on Apply and save

Below is the result.

Second level element

As shown in the above screen, first-level elements color has been applied to the table visual.

Second-level elements color has been applied to the different legends, data tooltip highlights, slicers, etc.

Also, if we hover on any line charts, gridlines are changed with the second-level elements.

Conclusion

This is how we can easily create the theme for the current report. Isn’t it amazing?

Stay connected with me for more amazing articles!!

Happy reporting!!