Designing reports for mobile devices
Power BI embraces the mobile-first world that is quickly approaching, if it is not already here. Many report users will prefer interacting with reports on their mobile phones or tablets. Power BI works with all modern browsers, so this is not a problem. The problem is, especially for phones and smaller tablets, the default landscape orientation is not the way your end users usually use their phone. You can create an additional view that is optimized for mobile devices and displays in portrait orientation. Power BI has a mobile layout option that, alongside the Power BI app for those devices and the Power BI service, can detect when a device is in portrait mode and change to a more thumb-friendly vertical alignment.
To create a mobile-optimized version of your report, you can do the following:
- Design a mobile layout view, where you can drag and drop certain visuals onto a phone emulator canvas.
- Use visuals and slicers that are suitable for use on small mobile screens.
When you publish your report, the mobile version is published and enabled automatically.
To create a mobile-optimized view of your report, select the Mobile layout option on the View ribbon. This will open a scrollable canvas where you can add back the visuals that were on the report page. Drag the visuals you want from the Page visuals pane onto the reporting canvas. You can then resize and reposition them as you see fit.

Figure 11.27 – Mobile report layout page
Visuals on the mobile page will continue to cross-filter and cross-highlight. Slicers will continue to work as before.
Sometimes you may want to change some of the options for your visualizations. Font sizes may need to be changed or background colors added or removed to make the report more readable. You make these changes by selecting the visualization and editing the options in the Visualizations panel. If you do make a change here, it will only affect the mobile layout. Power BI will also generate a small, visual marker on the section and the setting you changed.

Figure 11.28 – Power BI indicating that you changed some of the visualization’s properties in the mobile report view
Power BI fully embraces our mobile-first world and natively allows you to create mobile-friendly report layouts.