Timothy Osborn

Timothy OsbornSep 18, 2026

One of the biggest mistakes I made in my first year of developing Power BI reports was going with the standard canvas size.   In Nov ’25 the post carrying this tagline generated quite a lot of discussion.   As many will notice, the image shows the old default canvas size of 1280 (w) x 720 (h).   As long as you update to the Fluent 2, the new default is 1920(w) x 1080(h).   For many, I’m sure this is a welcome change. A bigger canvas gives you more pixels on the screen, more room for charts and more room for, well, anything really.   However not everyone is in agreement so I wrote a deep dive on the topic in my latest blog article, see it here: https://lnkd.in/gAmMmgZ3   Follow for more PBI & Ai tips, tricks and controversial Power BI canvas sizes 😀

Timothy OsbornSep 25, 2026

Power BI Core Visual workarounds allow you to get some pretty cool looking visuals. But every one of these has a hidden cost. I look into a few of my own workarounds and the knock on effects of these hacks. So I went back through a few of my old posts to see what these knock on effects were. Every one of these tricks leaves measures behind that mean nothing to the business: an error bar coloured the same as the background, a transparent line used as a ruler, a minimum that only exists so a stacked bar can float. They're invisible on the page, not in the export. A user right clicks your nice clean chart, exports the summarized data, and gets a column called Error Bars next to the number they actually wanted. 👀 The good news is Microsoft paid off two items on that bill this year: • Conditional formatting on line charts in July, so colouring a line by value no longer means layering a second copy of it, • Tooltip fields only in June, so the hover stops showing the scaffolding. So before I build one of these now, I ask whether it will still be explainable in six months. The error bar trick passes easily. The label rail under the x axis mostly doesn't, because it's tied to the height of the visual. Full write up here: https://lnkd.in/gz74u9Xg Follow for more PBI tips and tricks and sneaky workarounds with a hidden cost 😲 #PowerBI #PBI #DAX

Timothy OsbornSep 24, 2026

Matt Pocock's /prototype skill allows you to visually see the thing that you are discussing about building with your ai agent directly in a local browser session. This allows you to create a high fidelity spec to ensure that you are perfectly in line with your agent prior to going and building whatever is the thing that you want to build. It also allows you to interact with that prototype so you can select, deselect and give various feedback right there in the prototyping session, allowing you to interactively refine the spec in a very user friendly way. In the screen I am working on some color themes for a website that allows you to not only create Power BI themes and templates but also see what they would look like with real Deneb visual templates in the report. Right now I'm up to helping users to ensure that they get a really great colour theme for their Power BI report that they're building. I've found that when it comes to finding online tools to help Power BI developers choose a really great theme and background template for a report, a lot of them are either quite manual and don't guide the user through the process or they offer paid pre-made templates and collections that the user needs to fork out a lot of money for before they even know whether they're buying is a good thing or not. I want to change that by creating a tool that guides the user through the process while making it free for everybody to use. Follow for more updates on the roll out and keep an eye on my site, binexus.net