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
WallingSoft 
Hi wallingsoft, thanks for a great visual. I have one issue with control in relation to sort. I am unable to control the sort of the text records shown. The sort is based on a field different than the text field. E.g. fields: mytext (used by the visual), mysortorder (1,2,3,4) should be used to dictate the order in which the text entries are shown. Thank you in advance for your reply.
Please send the file you’re using to info at wallingsoft dot com. I would like to review. Current version of the visual supports sorting based on a ‘sort by’ column defined in the data model (this was tested and verified) so I’d like to see what is specifically what if anything is wrong in the report you’re using.
Can you please provide a valid email address since at wallingsoft.com comes back as bounce with an invalid exception. Thanks.
Sorry, got try wallingsoft at live dot com.You can also click the “contact author” link on this page: https://app.powerbi.com/visuals/show/LongTextViewer1453740445633
Done – thanks!