Long Text Viewer -January ’17 Update BETA

Posted on by wallingsoft

Update January 23, 2017: The beta now respects line breaks! Get your updated beta build at the link below.

After 6 months since the last release of Long Text Viewer, it was due for an update. And what an update this is. I wanted to say thank you for everyone who has used Long Text Viewer and sent comments and questions. I’ve not been able to respond to everyone who emailed, but I hope this update addresses the biggest feature asks and bug reports.

New features and behavior changes in the January ’17 Update

Support for data formatting – one major change in this version is support for the model data formatting properties. Often data models include number formats like currency symbols or numerical precision, and dates have many nuanced formats. All of these are configurable in the data model. With this build, the model data formats are fully supported just like in other Power BI visuals. This will change the way data is presented in some cases, but I think it’s a big improvement over the previous behavior.

Sorting support – now you can sort rows alphabetically using the built-in sorting UI. You’ll find the sorting options under the “…” icon in the Power BI UI.

Breaking text into additional lines – many users have written in to say their text is really a set of paragraphs, and were looking for a way to show each paragraph as a separate line of text. Two features were added. Firstly, Long Text Viewer automatically splits lines when it encounters new line characters in the text. This will greatly simplify use for most users. But for some users, they have a custom character or string that delimits each line. The Newline starts with property found in the formatting pane lets you specify a text string that will be used for breaking text into additional lines.  The characters need to be in the text and they are removed before the text lines are shown.  For example, with input text like below:

This is a line of text.\This is a second line of text.

New line string “\”.

Renders as follows:

This is a line of text.

This is a second line of text.

Better scroll bar behaviors – The scroll bars in Long Text Viewer needed a few fixes. The biggest change is that the scrollable property is now set to ‘On’ by default. Many users wrote in asking why scrollbars didn’t just appear automatically. This behavior change may affect some reports, but it’s a better default as validated by real world users. I also made tweaks to the scroll bar behaviors: the horizontal scroll bar no longer appears and the vertical scroll bar doesn’t overlap the text anymore. You can still turn off the scrollbars altogether by setting the scrollable property to ‘Off’.

Better Alignment behaviors – The vertical and horizontal alignment feature was great when it was added, but now is even better. Specifically, when a single value is rendered in the Long Text Viewer, it now actually aligns correctly. There is still a persistent issue with bottom alignment that causes the vertical scroll bar to appear, unfortunately there’s no quick fix for this issue and it will persist for the foreseeable future.

Better margins – One annoying aspect of the first version of Long Text Viewer was a persistent space at the top that you could not remove. It has been removed (this is a behavior change from the previous version). There are now top margin and bottom margin properties in the formatting pane that allow you to restore spacing around lines of text if you’d like.

A note about the Beta – the Beta visual installs side by side with the production visual. After the new version reaches the Power BI Custom Visuals gallery, please use that version instead of the Beta. The Beta build will not receive updates unless there are bugs that are not fixed in the production version.

Some features are not planned – Some of you have asked for rich text support or the ability to render arbitrary HTML. These capabilities are not planned for Long Text Viewer.

As always I love seeing how you’re using Long Text Viewer and hearing your experiences.

-Wallingsoft

Long Text Viewer for Power BI

Posted on by wallingsoft

Power BI is a great tool for data storytelling. You can create interactive charts and graphs. But sometimes, you need to say more than just one line of text. Let’s face it some of our text is verbose.

Long Text Viewer is a custom visual for Power BI that wraps long text so that it all fits within the width of the visual.  You get a nice vertical scroll bar where you can read all the text easily without painful horizontal scrolling. You can adjust the text size and color so you can make it look great in your report. Commonly, you’d use a slicer or other selection within Power BI to change which text is shown by the Long Text Viewer.

long text viewer

How Long Text Viewer Works

Long Text Viewer receives text from your report’s data and renders it in a series of inline DIV statements. Here are the gotchas:

  • Only plain text is supported.
  • Long Text Viewer does not even attempt to figure out HTML tags, Rich Text markup, or even new line characters.  It just displays text.
  • You can use a measure to return a text string only when you have one value.  A handy example is shown below.

How to use DAX to return just one string value

Let’s say for a second you have a Table called TableName and the text you want to display is in a column called TextColumn. Sound like a math problem, well it isn’t; just basic DAX filtering. So the measure you’d write to get a single line of text, is below. This is useful if you want to show text only if just one value is selected on the report page.

Measure = if(HASONEVALUE(TableName[TextColumn]), VALUES(TableName[TextColumn]), “”)

Thanks for using Long Text Viewer, let us know if you’d like any improvement or changes.

– WallingSoft Team

Image Viewer for Power BI

Posted on by wallingsoft

Power BI is a great tool for data storytelling. You can create interactive charts and graphs. But sometimes, you need a picture to help you tell the story, connect with your audience, or just to provide the context needed for understanding.

Image Viewer is a custom visual for Power BI that shows an image based on a URL you prove through your data. Its great for showing product images, pictures of people, logos of companies, or pictures of locations. The Image Viewer shows the image in your reports, or dashboards. Because its data driven, as your user clicks around on your report, the images changes to reflect the selection. Commonly, you’d use a slicer or other selection within Power BI to change which images is shown by the Image Viewer.

image viewer

How Image Viewer Works

Image Viewer receives an image URL from your report and loads it into your report. Here are the gotchas:

  • The images is loaded into an <img src="” /> tag. If you’re not familiar with img HTML tags, read about them here.
  • The image must be in .jpg, jpeg, or .png format. These are the formats browsers automatically load into img  HTML tags.
  • The image must be available in an public location. The img tag does not do any authentication. So if you put the image on a secure server, it will not load. The solution is to move it to a public location where anyone on the Internet view it.
  • If you provide Image Viewer with multiple images, Image Viewer will show the first one it receives. If you want to see which this is, you can change Image Viewer into a table (temporarily we hope) to see what the URL is by default.
  • The provided image is stretched proportionally to width. This makes the images fit as best it can within the space you provide it.
  • The bigger the image, the longer it will take to download to your user’s browser. So if you expect the user to switch between images quickly, select image files that will download quickly so your users don’t get annoyed.

Thanks for using ImageViewer, let us know if you’d like any improvement or changes.

– WallingSoft Team

P.S. You may wonder why ImageViewer is not in the Office Store. It might make it here once the weather gets rainier in Seattle.

Print Screen Comments

Posted on by wallingsoft

If you’ve ever needed to “show” someone where to click, or what’s not quite right in a document, app, or a picture, then Print Screen Comments might very well be right for you.

Download Print Screen Comments from the Windows Store

The app is pretty simple, but tailored to it’s purpose. Here’s an example:

apps.46842.9007199266260964.2c1ff5c2-4988-48cc-a13e-b638953d4f96

Taking and sharing notes on images has never been easier than with Print Screen Comments:
•Easy to use comments in pictures
•Easy to share comments in apps
•Easy to email your comments to others

More details after the break.
WindowsStore_badge_en_English_Green_large_120x462

Now the details:

  • To start, just use the Print Screen button, or hold Windows Button + Volume down (if you’re on a tablet), or use your favorite screen clipping utility. Then paste into Print Screen Comments. You can also share image files to Print Screen Comments using the Share Charm.
  • You get some basic cropping and fitting features to get the image to where you’d like it.
  • Add comments just by tapping or clicking anywhere on the image. Rather than trying to draw your comments with a finger, just type them into the handy comment boxes using the regular keyboard (much better!).
  • You can move the comment pins to just the right spot and even change their color to suit your preferences.
  • When you’re ready, just save or copy to clipboard, or use the sharing charm to send the image of your comments to someone for their review.
  • When you send email with Print Screen Comments, the text of the comments is added to the email, so you don’t have to re-type it later!

Hope you like it!

Download Print Screen Comments from the Windows Store

Privacy Policy

Posted on by wallingsoft

WallingSoft does not collect personally identifiable information about you when you use applications created by WallingSoft.  Some applications created by WallingSoft enable you to use 3rd party services.  Use of any 3rd party services is within your control and you should read the privacy and terms of service of 3rd party services before using them.

About WallingSoft

Posted on by wallingsoft

WallingSoft is a small software development organization based in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle, WA.

WallingSoft’s mission is to build applications that make a genuine difference in a person’s day-to-day life.

To get support for any applications, please search for a post related to the application and provide a comment.  Comments are reviewed regularly and responses are posted on the site.

Thank you, looking forward to hearing from you and how WallingSoft’s applications help you in your day-to-day life!!!