Lecture video · L10 Report Design

[Slide 1] You can now build honest charts and wire them so a reader can drive — and still ship a page nobody reads. Tonight is the discipline that closes that gap. Design is not decoration; it is the difference between a page that argues and a page that merely contains. The good news is that report design is a small number of learnable rules, most of which you have been absorbing since week one without their names. Tonight you get the names, and the capstone will demand the practice.

[Slide 2] The master rule, from which everything else tonight derives: every page answers one question, and the page's title says which. Are we beating target — that is a page. How is the business doing — that is a report, and it wants splitting into the pages inside it. Last week's frame told you who a page is for, answer readers or explorers; this rule tells you what it is about. And the test is merciless in the best way: if you cannot state a page's question in one sentence, you are looking at several pages sharing a canvas, and every one of them reads worse for the company.

[Slide 3] Readers enter a page at the top left and sweep through it like a Z, and the layout should be built for that path. Top left gets the answer — the headline number or the page's most important claim. Not the logo; the logo earns the bottom corner, where the eye rests. The top band carries the context cards, reading left to right in story order. The body holds the evidence, and here is the silent rule most pages break: size is emphasis. The most important visual gets the most canvas — because a page where everything is the same size is claiming everything matters equally, which is another way of claiming nothing does. And the controls — slicers — cluster at the bottom or right rail, where the eye ends, because readers absorb the default view first and adjust after.

[Slide 4] Two mechanical disciplines separate professional pages from student pages at a glance. First, alignment: every visual edge snaps to a shared grid, and Power BI's gridlines and snap-to-grid exist precisely for this. A page with seventeen slightly different left edges reads as careless — and here is the unfair, universal part: readers extend visual carelessness to numerical distrust. Same numbers, less belief. Design for the reader you actually have. Second, white space: it is a tool, not waste. The gap between visuals is a claim — close together means related, far apart means separate — and the urge to fill every pixel deletes that information while producing the cockpit nobody reads. In the practice you will count your own left edges before and after the pass; the delta is the lesson.

[Slide 5] Quick beat on the part of tonight that is not optional. A screen reader user reaches your category chart and hears the alt text. Option A: bar chart. Option B: Furniture leads revenue at twenty-four point eight million, about five times Decor. One minute — which serves, and what is the general rule? Option A tells the listener there is a chart they cannot see. Thanks. Option B performs the chart's job — it delivers the finding. The rule: alt text is the title's understudy. It describes the finding, not the furniture, because for this reader the alt text is not a caption on the visual — it IS the visual. Every visual in your assignment carries finding-first alt text, and the grader checks all of them.

[Slide 6] The full kit, named. Contrast: text meets four and a half to one against its background, three to one for large text — the Iris theme passes by construction, and the place pages quietly fail is the elegant pale-gray annotation somebody adds at the end. Alt text: the finding, on every visual, as we just practiced. Tab order: keyboard and screen-reader users traverse visuals in the Selection pane's order, which defaults to the order you happened to build things — chaos. Set it to the reading path: answer, context, evidence, controls. And the standing color rule, now formalized with its test: before shipping, view the page through a color-vision simulator, and if any claim disappears when red and green merge, that claim was riding on color alone — and one reader in twelve never received it. None of this is polish. It has been the course's default since the theme arrived in week one; tonight you learned what the defaults were doing.

[Slide 7] Two closing frames. First, vocabulary that matters next week: colloquially everything is a dashboard, but in Power BI the words are technical. A report is what you have been building — multi-page, interactive, an argument over one model. A dashboard is a Service-side single screen of pinned tiles — glanceable, lightly interactive, the lobby television. Reports argue; dashboards monitor. When a stakeholder says dashboard, ask what they will do with it — the verb picks the artifact. Second, performance is a design property. Every visual issues queries; a thirty-visual page is a thirty-conversation meeting, and slow pages do not merely annoy — a reader waiting eleven seconds starts wondering if the numbers are broken, and doubt, once rented, is expensive to evict. Fewer, larger visuals; measures over columns; and the Performance Analyzer when a page drags — it names the slow visual, which is usually a table rendering ten thousand rows nobody will scroll. Design and performance keep giving the same advice from different directions. When the disciplines agree, listen.

[Slide 8] Tonight in five lines. One page, one question, stated in the title — split what fails. The answer lives top left, evidence is ranked by size, controls wait at the rail. Alignment and white space are credibility you can literally count in left edges. The accessibility kit — contrast, finding-first alt text, tab order, the one-in-twelve test — ships by default, and this week's Hot practice has you defend exactly that position in a sprint-planning fight, with a stopwatch as your best witness. Assignment A-ten runs the full design pass over the report you have been building since week four — it is, on purpose, your capstone's dress rehearsal. Next week: the Power BI Service. Everything you have built finally leaves your laptop — publishing, workspaces, refresh, and the row-level security that decides who sees what.