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Textboxes with dynamic values (teething issues and wishlist)

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Sean McLarty's profile image

Sean McLarty on 19 Jan 2021 00:25:18

Dynamic values are a fantastic new feature in textboxes that is available when you've enabled the Smart Narratives preview feature. They've allowed me to start creating paginated reports in Power BI suitable for exporting to PDF without having to use Report Builder.

I've found a couple of "teething issues" with dynamic values:
• Often dynamic values will lose their definitions - they display correctly but I can no longer see how they are calculated.
• I have a live connection to a Power BI dataset. The dynamic value allows me to use measures defined in the "parent" report, but it does not find measures created in the "child" report.
• The vertical scrollbar sometimes appears in textboxes for published reports when they are not visible in report builder. I have to resize the textbox to avoid this.

Textbox wish-list:
• It's amazing how dynamic values can understand natural language to perform filterting. It would also be easier if textboxes could have standard filters them like other visuals.
• Could dynamic values allow you to display report metadata, such as the name of the current tab page, or the report name?
• The floating formatting bar often gets in the way, could texbox's formatting controls be move to the application's toolbar?
• Could more formatting options be included such as bullet points?