A critical use case for many reports is mobile access via the Power BI mobile applications for iOS, Android, and Windows platforms. A report that is perfectly designed for a laptop or PC monitor may be difficult to use on a tablet or mobile device. To account for multiple form factors, including both small and largescreen phones, report authors can create mobile-optimized reports via the Phone Layout view in Power BI Desktop.

In the following example, the Phone Layout of a report page in Power BI Desktop is accessed via the View tab:

Phone Layout

From the Phone Layout view, the visuals created and formatted for the report page can be arranged and sized on a mobile layout grid. In the following example, the two KPI and card visuals included in the preceding image from the Report View, as well as a line chart, are arranged on the phone canvas:

Phone Layout

Single-number visuals, such as cards and KPIs, are natural candidates for mobile-optimized layouts. More complex and data-intensive visuals, such as scatter charts and combination charts, are generally less effective choices for mobile layouts. Given the one-to-one relationship between report pages and the phone layout, one design option is to create a dedicated report page with the visuals needed for the phone layout.

The size and position of visuals can be adjusted by dragging visual icons along the phone layout grid. A mobile-optimized layout can be defined for each report page or any number of the pages contained in a report. The formatting and filter context of report visuals is always aligned between the Phone Layout and the default Report View. For example, to change the format or filter for a visual accessed via the Phone Layout, the visual can be modified from the standard Desktop Layout view.

When a report page is accessed from the Power BI mobile application, the Phone Layout created in Power BI Desktop will be rendered by default in the phone report mode. If a phone-optimized layout doesn't exist, the report opens in landscape view.

Power BI dashboards can also be optimized for mobile devices. The mobile layout for dashboards is implemented in the Power BI service and is reviewed in Chapter 13, Designing Power BI Dashboards and Architectures.