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Microsoft Idea

Power BI

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Ability to lock/unlock edditing of visualizations on a page

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on 08 Jan 2016 06:48:55

I frequently must prepare Power BI dashboards and reports that will be consumed predominantly by persons not deeply familiar with the Power BI environment.I would like to have the ability to lock/unlock visualizations for editing on a report page. A locked visualization would not be able to be moved or resized. It also would not have the visualization selection box appear when interacting with the visual. cross filtering and selection of objects within a visualization should not be affected. This would allow a published dashboard to have reports that share the same "finished" look and feel as the dashboard view.

Administrator on 22 Jul 2021 21:43:35

On the View tab in Power BI Desktop you'll find a 'Lock objects' option. This prevents objects from being accidentally moved or selected, but still lets you interact for cross-highlight, drill etc.

Comments (56)
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Steve on 05 Jul 2020 22:30:38

RE: Ability to lock/unlock edditing of visualizations on a page

I've been amazed at the power and flexibility of this tool. However this is one of maybe 2 or 3 omissions that have really surprised me: must haves that aren't there. In this case, I understand that, in principal, 'self-serve' reporting means that the designer IS the end-consumer and that this could justify the lack of lock-down mode. Of course, in practice, as anonymous points out, this simply isn't always true. Secondly, even when the designer really is the report user, the fiddly experience of hover-activating unwanted visualization outlines or options in a subtle manner degrades the experience--it doesn't feel right. Great product, great feature to add. Vote it up! : )

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Scott Stamper on 05 Jul 2020 22:29:32

RE: Ability to lock/unlock edditing of visualizations on a page

This is part of prepping Power BI for larger, more scalable Enterprise deployments. There should be a setting to control access and edit rights within a dashboard.

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Chris Southall on 05 Jul 2020 22:29:18

RE: Ability to lock/unlock edditing of visualizations on a page

I agree this would be very useful indeed, i agree that being able to move visualizations make the dashboards very flexible, but especially for novice users, the way the visualizations can be moved as well as the way they highlight on the dashboard can seem very alien for users, the ability to turn off this functionality would be very useful.

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Ashish Singh on 05 Jul 2020 22:23:12

RE: Ability to lock/unlock edditing of visualizations on a page

This features is very essential, specially when we try to build the "Include Only" or "Exclude Only" on charts by mere motion of mouse over categories to take down on Tableau : )

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ML Site on 05 Jul 2020 22:18:02

RE: Ability to lock/unlock edditing of visualizations on a page

I agree. This would be very useful for the desktop version. Any more than two overlapping objects makes it very hard to select the desired object underneath

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Power BI User on 05 Jul 2020 22:13:19

RE: Ability to lock/unlock edditing of visualizations on a page

I suppose I should specify this as a desired feature for the desktop designer as this functionality essentially exists already to some degree in the online version. Would also be nice to be able to design the dashboard view from within the designer before publishing.