Power BI Blog: Importing Fonts into Power BI
6 August 2020
Welcome back to this week’s edition of the Power BI blog series. This week, we look at how to import fonts into Power BI.
Let’s look a simple dashboard that we’ve created in a previous blog:
Imagine that the users that we are creating this dashboard for requested that we change the font in the report to Roboto. Sure, no problem. Let’s just click on a visualisation and navigate to the Title option and change the font family.
To our horror, Roboto is not one of the default fonts that is included in Power BI:
No worries, we can also change the default font used in this report in the theme, maybe that will yield better results.
Navigate to the View tab on the Ribbon, click on the drop-down option for Themes. Then select the ‘Customize current theme’ option:
The ‘Customize theme’ dialog box will appear allowing us to select a ‘Font Family’
Bad news, the font Roboto is not here either, so what can we do? Well, we could try and force it by importing a theme with the font specified in the JSON file (the file format that Power BI reads to import themes).
The first step is to create a theme, we do this by clicking the ‘Save current theme’ option:
Save the theme, then use Windows Explorer to find where you saved the theme. Power BI would have saved the file as a .json file.
Navigate to the JSON file’s location, open it with notepad, or any other text editing or code editing software available:
Now we add the following code to it:
,"visualStyles":{"*":{"*":{"*":[{"fontSize":12,"fontFamily":"Roboto","color":{"solid":{}}}]}}}
Note that this goes inside the brackets so the final code looks like this:
{"name":"Roboto",
"visualStyles":{"*":{"*":{"*":[{"fontSize":12,"fontFamily":"Roboto","color":{"solid":{}}}]}}}}
Save the file. Go back to Power BI and back to the themes drop-down menu. This time, we select ‘Browse for themes’:
Using Windows Explorer select the .json file that we have just edited and open it. Power BI will load the theme and hopefully we should see this message appear:
The fonts should now have been changed to Roboto!
We can confirm this by repeating the very first step, clicking on a visualisation then going to the Title area and selecting the ‘Font Family’ drop-down:
That’s it for this week, come back next week for more on Power BI.
In the meantime, please remember we offer training in Power BI which you can find out more about here. If you wish to catch up on past articles, you can find all of our past Power BI blogs here.
