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Category: Visualization

The Challenge of using Questions as Slide Titles

Published 2026-03-05 by Kevin Feasel

Simon Rowe explains a challenge:

The importance of an effective slide title cannot be overstated. Positioned in prime real estate at the top of the page, it is often where an audience’s eyes will land first. With that in mind, it is worth investing time to craft a title that introduces the content below and establishes a clear purpose. Too often, this valuable space is used for purely descriptive statements. Let’s look at an example.

Read on to see one example, showing how the change of titles and a bit of thought around the use of color as an identifying feature can make a big difference for viewers.

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Building a Graph for Its Takeaway

Published 2026-02-20 by Kevin Feasel

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic reminds us that visuals should have purpose:

I was facilitating a workshop recently when someone asked one of my favorite questions about a graph on the screen: “So… what are we supposed to take away from this?”

Such a simple—and useful—question.

One challenge was that the graph was attempting to show multiple comparisons at once, so it wasn’t clear what mattered most. To further complicate things, the data in question spanned very different magnitudes, with one category dwarfing the rest.

Click through for a demonstration and how changing the visual layout can affect the message. The challenge I tend to run into is that, when I’m developing a visual for an application or a report, I don’t know what the precise message should be at that moment in time. I have to design with an idea of the data, but what actually emerges will depend upon what data is in there. Tailoring a visual for a specific message at a specific point in time is a lot easier when building a presentation, but it gets tricky when you’re building an application for the long haul.

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Two Options for Content Layout in Power BI

Published 2026-02-16 by Kevin Feasel

Valerie Junk covers a pair of options:

In this tutorial, I want to show a small but very practical formatting setting in Power BI.

When we create a table or matrix visual, we sometimes end up with white space on the right side. For example, if you show data by month and you only have 6 months of data so far, but you design the visual to fit 12 months, the table/matrix is already sized for the full year, which leads to a lot of empty space.
In Power BI we have two column header formatting options:

Click through for the two options, where you can find the option, and some important information around both options.

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Choosing between PCA and t-SNE

Published 2026-02-13 by Kevin Feasel

Shittu Olumide visualizes some data:

For data scientists, working with high-dimensional data is part of daily life. From customer features in analytics to pixel values in images and word vectors in NLP, datasets often contain hundreds and thousands of variables. Visualizing such complex data is difficult.

That’s where dimensionality reduction techniques come in. Two of the most widely used methods are Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE). While both reduce dimensions, they serve very different goals.

The thing that ultimately soured me on t-SNE is the stochastic nature. You can run the same set of operations multiple times and get significantly different results. It’s really easy to use and the output graphs are really pretty, but if you can’t trust the outputs to be at least somewhat stable, there’s a hard limit to its value.

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Data Series Colors in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Michal Bar shows off a new capability:

A frequent request we receive from dashboard authors is the ability to have greater control over color settings.

Until now, color assignments in real-time dashboards were largely automatic. While this worked for basic scenarios, it often fell short in operational and reporting use cases where color isn’t decoration—it’s meaning. Data Series Colors is a new capability that gives authors direct control over how colors are applied to their visuals.

Read on to see how it works for real-time dashboards.

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Showing Transaction Details on Power BI Matrices

Published 2026-01-27 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari want more detail:

A common challenge in Power BI reporting is how to display several pieces of information about a single item (such as sales transactions, product details, or customer details) without dedicating a separate column to each attribute. Using individual columns for each detail can consume space, especially for fields that are often empty. This article explores techniques to consolidate multiple fields from a business entity or transaction into a single column in a matrix visual, thus presenting transaction details in a space-efficient way.

They walk through several iterations of the process. The real challenge with displaying those details is that your end users need to understand what’s in the details, as there’s no good way to describe what the information means. But when your users do understand what can be in there, I could see this being quite helpful.

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A Primer on Cognitive Perception

Published 2026-01-23 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley thinks about how we think:

You can be the greatest report designer on the planet, but if your report doesn’t meet the needs of the report consumer, it’s all for nothing. In this section, I break down the most important considerations for identifying your audience and their information needs. These are all factors to consider before you jump in and start designing your report.

Paul hits on quite a few of the foundational concepts around how humans visual stimuli and tells some interesting stories along the way.

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Changing Power BI Dashboard Themes by Toggle

Published 2026-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Valerie Junk demonstrates a process:

In this tutorial, I will recreate a project I built last year: a mini Power BI dashboard with a toggle button to change its appearance. When you toggle the button, the background color changes, the logo and snow switch images are updated, and the visuals are restyled accordingly (including the color of the trees). 

This project combines different tutorials I created in the past, which cover dynamic color changes and the lollipop visual.
At the bottom of this page, you will find a step-by-step video, and you can download the file from the download page.

Click through for instructions, the video, and a zip file to work from.

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Notes on Axis Scale in Visuals

Published 2026-01-08 by Kevin Feasel

Amy Esselman keeps track of axis:

One of the most common pitfalls in data visualization is manipulating axis scales in ways that distort the story. A frequent example is the use of logarithmic scales where they are not appropriate.

Let’s walk through a case where this choice can mislead, even if unintentionally.

Amy has some good guidance on when you should use log scale, as well as a good example of a case where applying it incorrectly can lead to distorted results.

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