The new card visual was introduced as part of the June 2023 Updates in Power BI. This update unlocks numerous formatting functions that not only make the card visual less basic and more aesthetically pleasing but also very functional and less time-consuming. 

This update is a great improvement to the good ol’ card visual. I’m excited to see how this update impacts our reports moving forward. I believe it has the potential to make a big difference.

Let’s dive into it!

To fully understand the benefits of this new update, let’s briefly review the limitations of the old card visual and see how this new visual addresses those limitations.

• Single Card at a Time: Previously, you could only create one card using the card visual. With the new card visual, you can create up to nine cards at a time and edit them all simultaneously. This is a great improvement!
  

• Shape: The old card visual only allowed users to create rectangles and rectangles with rounded corners. The new card visual offers more shape options, including rectangles, rounded rectangles, and snipped tabs with rounded corners. Users can also customize the degree of rounding for all or some corners. This level of customization is unprecedented!

• Card Elements: In the past, users would often overlap visual elements like icons, images, and text to add interest to their cards. While this was effective, it was time-consuming and could slow down the performance of the reports. The new card visual provides elements like images and accents that can be added without overlapping, which improves report performance and overall user experience.
• Working with blanks: Working with the old card, I disliked the card displaying “BLANK” when the value of the data in question was blank. The hack was to add a “+0” to the measure to ensure that the visual displayed 0 rather than “Blank.”The new card visual is impressive because it allows users to add a value for when data is blank, and even apply conditional formatting. This makes reports more dynamic and interactive.

Working with the new card visual.

Once you open Power BI Desktop, the new card visual can be seen amongst other visuals.

If not found, you can turn on the new card feature by  File > Options > Options and Settings> Preview Features > New card visual.

The new card visual can display data from multiple fields, and the order of the fields is determined by the order they appear in the data field well. 

Formatting with the new card 

There are more options available to work with with the new card visual. 

In the Callout section, we can see that the new card offers refined formatting settings for values and labels, with expanded support for conditional formatting and the introduction of font transparency.

The custom option has been added to display units. This allows users more options to display numbers.

In the Cards section, you can format each card individually. I.e, you can choose to apply formatting on some of the cards.

You can also add images to the card either from your desktop or simply use the image URL.

The layout section provides a couple of options to beautify your formatting experience. In my opinion, the two most powerful options for creating a visually appealing layout are vertical alignment and spacing between cards. In the past, we had to create and merge multiple shapes and visuals to achieve this, but now we can do it with just a few clicks.

I hope this article has been helpful in explaining the new card visual in Power BI. I encourage you to experiment with the new visual and see how it can be used to improve your reports.