Customizing PowerView in PowerPoint

Although “customizing” may be too strong of a word, there are few things that we can tweak to improve the look and feel of PowerView slides that had just been exported from SharePoint. The first thing to do after the fresh export is to adjust the size of the exported image. For some reason as you can see in the image below, the PowerView image does not take up the entire slide, leaving some white edges around which would not be a problem if the PowerView image has a white background, but in my case, I have used a grey background in PowerView and it does not look good on a white PowerPoint background.

Luckily, this can be easily remedied by just clicking on the image and resizing it to fit the entire slide. That helps while presenting the static slide, however, after one clicks the “Interact” button the, unsightly white lines come back again around the edges of the slide.

The only way that I found to make that white space go away is to do the following:

1. Right click on the PowerView image and click on Property Sheet
2. A property screen will come up with the following parameters: ViewMode=CachedPreview,ReportSection=ReportSection2,AllowSectionNavigation=False,Fit=True,PreviewBar=False,BackgroundColor=White,Border=True,AllowEditViewMode=False,AllowFullScreenViewMode=False,Trace_HostApplication=Powerpoint
3. Note that the BackgroundColor is set to White which is why we are see those white lines on the edges of our visualization
4. Change the background to black or any other color that matches the background of your PowerView slide
5. Don’t forget to hit save 🙂

That should be all you need to do to make sure that your PowerView looks nice in PowerPoint if its background is anything but white.

The rest of the parameters are interesting as well…

For example, by default, each PowerView view is exported into a separate slide, so one needs to physically move from one slide to another and click on “Interact” again and again. Setting the AllowSectionNavigation to True allows us to navigate from one PowerView view to another from the same slide, which is similar to the end-user experience in SharePoint. Both, Thumbnail button, Font Selection as well as the Navigation Arrows now become available