Buttons may be my favorite visual in Power BI. I have been working with reports that utilize a selected measure pattern, such as a slicer to change the measures on charts from Sales to Revenue. In my recent challenge report I have a slicer to change all the charts on the page to one of four measures: Customers, Orders, Revenue, or Sales. I was using a Numerro template that had a 4 cards at the top with an icon for each. I thought it would be neat to shade those icons to show which measure was active, like this:
Here, I have selected "Customers" and the icon for Customers highlights in yellow. If I select "Orders" then its icon should highlight, etc.
This is the way I did this using buttons:
1) The icons are already in place as images, so I deleted them, and replaced the first one with a button (I will do the rest after we set up this first button). I set the image in the "Fill" section of the "Format Button". This works really well because to change out an icon I simply remove the icon from the fill section and pick a new one! The image is a file on my computer, not a link or base64 included image as well. All the other settings stay the same. I have turned off all the other "Format button" sections.
2) Next I created a measure that converts what the selected measure is from a text value to a number value. This is important for setting the conditional formatting for the fill color, as it needs to be a number. My selected measure is driven by a table where I have the four possible measures as text, so I just need to use SELECTEDVALUE() to find which one is currently in use, and give it a unique number. If there is no measure selected, I chose to return blank, but if I had a default measure I could have chosen to use that ones value too.
3) Back in the "Fill" section of the button, the fill color can changed with conditional formatting -- that's the little "Fx" button by the fill color. I made sure to pick a good default fill color before setting up the conditional formatting. That default color will be the fill color of the unselected measures. Then I click the "Fx" button and set up the conditional formatting for the selected measure.
I chose to format by rules, based on field "Selected Measure Formatting", and if the value is 1 (number, not percent!) then it will be the light yellow color I wanted. I click OK when I am done setting this up.
Here I know that Customers is value 1, so I set that to be the yellow highlight color. I don't do anything else. If it's any value other than 1, then the default color will be used instead.
4) Now that first button is set up, I will copy and paste it for the next one, Orders. For the new button I (1) change the image and then I (2) modify the fill color conditional formatting this time to look for the value to be 2. I do the same for the Revenue and Sales measures. And I am done!
Hope this helps you in your reports, or gives you other ideas of how to utilize buttons in your reports. Thank you for reading!