Power BI Page Breaks Formatting

Power BI is the reporting platform most used with Project Online. It’s interactive. It’s visual. It allows for drilldowns of data. It allows for custom columns and measures to display your project metrics in flexible ways depending on the audience.
When reporting from Project Online, the data is stored in Odata feeds. There are many tables of data from Projects to Tasks to Assignments. Even though you may see the formatting in the custom fields in Project Online, all formatting is stripped out when the data is stored with Odata feeds.
There is a workaround to this that can be implemented into your reports! You can designate a special character be used as part of your business process then in Power BI use that character to create a line break.

1. Decide the character that would work best for your team to use as separator. I recommend not using characters you may use in the content itself, such as underscore (_) or dash (-). I typically use the asterisk (*). Add the character immediately before you would like to see the line break in the reporting.

Here is an example of how the data looks when entered in the Project Details Page:

Figure 1: Example of how the data looks when entered in the Project Details Page.

This is how adding this field into the Power BI report straight from Odata displays:

Figure 2: Odata display Power BI report

2. In your Power BI report data model, create a custom column that searches for your designated special character and substitute it with a line break (UNICHAR(10).

Figure 3: AccomplishmentsCol = SUBSTITUTE(Projects[AccomplishmentsLastPeriod],”*”, UNICHAR(10))

3. Add the new custom column data to your visuals to see the new way the data is displayed!

Figure 4: The new custom column data is displayed.

If there are several columns to implement the substitution on, a new custom column will need to be created for each.