When creating dashboards in Power BI you want to organize and adjust the size and position of visuals in the best way possible. This may include aligning the column layout of two (or more) separate tables, placing one on top of the other.
First, let’s have a look at an example where tables are not aligned. In the image below you can see, that even though visuals are aligned, columns inside the visuals are not. This makes a report harder to read since you cannot visually follow the data from the upper table to the bottom one:
You can fix this by applying settings so that all columns have the exact same width.
Let’s start with the leftmost column (categories) where BusinessUnits and Customers are displayed in the two visuals, respectively. To align the width of the category column in both visuals, go to the Categories group of settings, set Text width to Fixed, and set the desired width of the Category column in pixels (in our case 170). This means that this column will always have a fixed width, regardless of the text in categories.
Next, let’s also align the value columns. In our case, these are monthly values from the “Month” data field that was added to the Group placeholder in both visuals. To set a fixed width of these columns, navigate to the Group title setting, et the Text width to Fixed, and set the desired width in pixels (50 in our case):
Now both tables should be perfectly aligned.
Before we have a look at the final result let’s apply one last adjustment. Keeping in mind our original example, we can see that rows in each visual have different heights. Even though row height alignment is not as important as column alignment, this setting still does contribute to the overall clarity and consistency of the report. To make sure that the rows have exactly the same height in both visuals, navigate to the Categories group of settings, and set the Row height to either Font sized or Fixed on both visuals. In our case, we chose Font sized x1.5:
Looking at the picture below we can see that both tables are now perfectly aligned across all columns, as well as use exactly the same row height. This makes the report much more organized and more user-friendly:
