Rotating Text Boxes in Power BI

Power BI has added a lot of customization and features and Microsoft continues to roll out new customizations each month.

Though most elements of a Power BI dashboard are meant to be dynamic, sometimes you need a text box with static information.   To insert static information you can select a text box from the Home menu.

You then end up with something like this:

.

But what if you want to rotate the text 90 degrees either for design or clarity’s sake?  Currently this feature is not available in Power BI (surprisingly, you can rotate shapes.)

There is a workaround available.

Simply created a stacked bar chart and hide all the content except the Y-Axis label.  To do this, select a single data field and put it into a stacked bar chart.

Then go to the features menu and turn off all the features except the Y-axis features.

Add a label to the Y-axis that contains the text you want and then minimize the the visualization so that all you can see if the y-axis label.

Then you’ll have this: