Alberto Ferrari takes us through key performance indicator creation in Power BI Desktop:
Starting from the July 2020 version, Power BI Desktop offers the possibility of using external tools to modify its internal Tabular model. With a tool like Tabular Editor, you can create a KPI directly in Power BI Desktop so that it can be used in any Power BI report and also by using the Analyze in Excel feature. The KPI feature was previously available only in Tabular models created in Analysis Services or Power BI Premium. This introductive article shows you how to create and consume KPIs in Power BI Desktop. A more detailed description of the available KPI graphics and the corresponding state values is the topic for an upcoming article.
Let us see the feature with a practical – though fictitious – example. Say Contoso needs to analyze the Margin % of its products. The yardstick is the overall margin, which is the Margin % over time and products with a tolerance of 2%. The overall margin of Contoso is 53%. Therefore, a category with a Margin % less than 51% is considered bad (red), over 55% is considered good (green), in between 51% and 55% is considered average (yellow). Moreover, Contoso wants to analyze the trend of Margin % compared with the previous year. For example, the margin might be red but Contoso can evaluate which action to take depending on whether it is improving or not over time.
Read on for the demonstration.