A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Microsoft recently introduced a new default visual design style for Power BI named Fluent 2. I personally disagree with a few choices in the new defaults, including the removal of alternating row colors from Table and Matrix visuals.
Click through to see how you can bring back alternate row shading.
Leave a CommentMauricio Vargas Sepulveda has released an R package:
The goal of spuriouscorrelations is to keep alive the amazing examples from Tyler Vigen. Unfortunately, as of 2023-10-09, the website is down as my students noticed. Therefore, I decided to use the snapshot from the Internet Wayback Machine to save the datasets from 2023-06-07.
Click through to see how you can re-live those old charts, using the example of “number of people who drowned by falling into a pool” versus “films Nicolas Cage appeared in” on an annual basis. H/T R-Bloggers.
Leave a CommentThomas Williams is back with more:
In my last post on improving inputs in R Markdown/Shiny, I covered four improvements to quality of life in interactive reports and dashboards. In this blog post I have three more, all approaches I’ve used to add professionalism to self-service R Markdown files.
In yet another plug for R Markdown: most of these techniques can be used in a single *.Rmd file, or can be included in many by putting them in a common CSS or javascript file and linking to it.
Click through to see what you can do.
Leave a CommentMarco Russo and Alberto Ferrari format things differently:
A challenging requirement in Power BI reports is that of applying different formatting rules based on the level of aggregation. At the year level, the background shade may reflect each year’s share of the grand total. At the quarter level, a status color may indicate whether the quarter is above or below the average. At the month level, the color may flag exceptional values, like months that contribute more than a defined threshold to their year. Each level has its own logic; what the conditional expression of the measure needs to know is which level the current cell belongs to.
Read on to see how you can pull this off.
Comments closedTeo Lachev takes a look at a new preview:
The June release of Power BI Desktop includes a preview of a new Power BI slicer configuration – Date Picker. It’s meant to solve two issues with report design.
Read on to see what those two issues are and how this new date picker can resolve them. It’s still in preview, so you’d have to change the settings in Power BI Desktop. And I imagine it won’t be available in Power BI Report Server because those people (including me) can’t be trusted to have nice things.
Comments closedThomas Williams shares a few tips:
In this post I go over some low-effort ways to improve controls to save space, offer missing functionality, and better help end users. See the file https://github.com/thomasswilliams/r-markdown-snippets/blob/main/improve-inputs-1.Rmd for the full source code in a ready-to-run R Markdown file (all you need is R and RStudio).
Click through for several examples.
Comments closedKoji Makiyama announces an update to an R package:
TheseusPlot is an R package that decomposes differences in a rate metric between two groups into subgroup-level contributions and visualizes the results as a “Theseus Plot”.
For example, when a click-through rate, conversion rate, or retention rate differs between two time periods or groups, TheseusPlot helps answer questions such as: which subgroup contributed most to the difference?
I love the name and I think the plot concept is interesting, especially in the e-commerce context that Koji describes. H/T R-Bloggers.
Comments closedKurt Buhler explains a new capability:
For years, the Power BI community has been clamoring to have native support for visuals-as-code; the ability to create visuals, pages, or even entire dashboards with libraries like Vega, and D3.js. This is now possible in Microsoft Fabric with Fabric Apps, specifically, using a data app.
A Fabric App is a new item type that lets you create and distribute any interactive experiences in Fabric, rather than pre-defined reports, dashboards, and data agents. These are web applications (or webapps). A webapp is any program that runs in a browser (like YouTube, Facebook, or Microsoft Word’s online editor) instead of one that you install on your computer (like Power BI Desktop or Microsoft Word).
Read on to see how you can build Fabric Apps, as well as what they are and aren’t.
Comments closedZhenguo Zhang moves the legend somewhere else:
By default,
ggplot2places the legend outside the plot area (usually on the right). However, sometimes you may want to move the legend inside the plot to save space or improve the layout. This post explores how to achieve this usingtheme()parameters.
Click through to see what options are available.
Comments closedZhenguo Zhang adds some patterns:
Adding patterns to plots is a great way to improve accessibility (making plots colorblind-friendly) and to add an extra dimension of information. The
ggpatternpackage provides a rich set of tools to achieve this inggplot2.
I’m personally not the biggest fan of patterns. I see them as a point of necessity when dealing with grayscale circumstances, such as printing out a chart in an academic journal. But it’s very easy to overdo patterns and end up making a mess of the visual.
But one side note about color vision deficiency and plots: make sure that your plots are monochrome-friendly because somebody probably will try to print out your chart or view it on a grayscale-only device. Or might actually be monochromatic.
Comments closed