Category: Power BI

Reid Havens has a few tips for making Power BI reports look nicer:

This is less of a single applied step as it is multiple formatting practices applied throughout the report. I’ve already hit on this subject a little bit in the two previous Power BI visual design practices in regards to using complimentary colors. The two key takeaways in this section are object formatting and color coordination.

Of all my best practices I’m showcasing here I’d say this one is the most subjective. However I think that maintaining complimentary colors goes a long ways to creating a professional looking report. I also have a strong dislike for the default title design for visualizations in Power BI. By default it is left aligned and a grey color (AGAIN…hard to read!). I center that sucker and color the background. An added benefit to coloring the title background is it actually forces me to make sure my objects are aligned, otherwise it is VERY noticeable now if they aren’t.

Definitely read the comments on this one, as some of these tips are subjective.

Devin Knight continues his Power BI custom visuals series with the Route Map visual:

In this module you will learn how to use the Route Map Power BI Custom Visual.  The Route Map uses latitude, longitude, and time to show the trajectory of an object on a map.

For a certain class of dashboard, this is quite powerful.

Devin Knight continues his Power BI custom visuals series:

In this module you will learn how to use the Play Axis Power BI Custom Visual.  The Play Axis visual works like a dynamic slicer that animates your other report visuals without needing to click every time you want to change your filter value.

This is a valuable custom visual when dealing with time series data, but as Devin shows, you can iterate through other sets, like a set of employee names.

Devin Knight has started a new series, walking through problems his clients have faced implementing Power BI solutions.  In this edition, Devin wants to build a comma-delimited list to display on a tooltip:

This works perfectly for Stock because it automatically summarizes the value but, you’ll notice above that the tooltip for Subcategory has an interesting behavior. Rather than displaying the list of the values in Subcategory it actually just show the very first value. This happens because the Tooltip field requires that any column used in it be able to aggregate or roll up the values into what’s shown on the chart. Since Subcategory is just a text field Power BI automatically applies the FIRST function to return back the first value that appears. You could optionally change this from FIRST to either LAST, COUNT, or COUNTDISTINCT.

So the real problem I want to solve here is rather than only showing the first subcategory how do I list all the subcategories in a comma separated list in the tooltip? Let’s walk through a couple possible designs to this solution.

Read on for two different designs, including the code to implement the solutions.

Devin Knight continues his Power BI custom visuals series:

Key Takeaways

• Let’s you expand and dig into each level of you hierarchy data.

• Allows you to display a measure value at the lowest level.

• Replaces the idea using multiple regular slicers to represent what the Hierarchy Slicer does.

This is a great visual if your dimensional data fits a good natural hierarchy.