You’re not doing anything wrong — and it’s not an issue with your environment.
This is a known UI bug / regression in the Power Platform admin experience, and everyone currently sees the same behavior.
✅ What you’re seeing
In Environment Settings → Document Templates → Related tables, the relationship dropdown shows values like:
<i>Account (Primary Contact)</i>
instead of rendering them as italic text.
Those <i> tags are supposed to visually distinguish:
…but the UI is not HTML-encoding the labels correctly.
❌ This is not configuration-related
It is not caused by:
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environment region
-
browser
-
tenant settings
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language
-
security roles
-
solution layering
You can reproduce it in:
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default environments
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sandbox environments
-
production environments
-
new tenants
✅ Root cause (what’s actually happening)
Internally, Dataverse stores relationship display names with HTML formatting:
<i>Account (Primary Contact)</i>
Older UI components rendered this properly.
The new Power Platform admin UI introduced around late 2024 / 2025:
So the UI literally prints:
<i>Relationship Name</i>
instead of formatting it.
🧠 Why it matters
The italics were originally used to indicate:
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inherited relationships
-
indirect relationships
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system-generated links
Without formatting:
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everything looks identical
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it’s harder to tell which relationship you’re selecting
-
template configuration becomes confusing
✅ Does this affect functionality?
No.
Despite the visual issue:
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the correct relationship is still selected
-
document templates still work
-
generated Word/Excel documents are correct
-
metadata behind the scenes is unchanged
It’s purely a UI rendering problem.
📌 Microsoft status
This has been reported multiple times through:
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Microsoft Learn Q&A
-
Power Platform Community
-
Support tickets
Current status:
✅ Workarounds
Unfortunately, there is no configuration-based fix.
Practical options:
✔ Ignore the formatting
The relationship names are still correct.
✔ Use Classic Advanced Settings (if available)
In some tenants:
Advanced Settings → Document Templates
still renders relationships correctly.
(This option is slowly being retired.)
✔ Use solution explorer metadata
If you need to confirm relationships:
❌ What you cannot do
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Cannot override labels
-
Cannot edit relationship display formatting
-
Cannot inject custom HTML
-
Cannot revert the admin UI
✅ Summary
-
✔ Not your environment
-
✔ Reproducible everywhere
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✔ Known Power Platform UI bug
-
✔ Visual only — no functional impact
-
❌ No current fix available
If you see raw HTML tags like <i> in relationship dropdowns:
That’s expected behavior right now.
