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Category: Visualization

Using Sankey Diagrams in Power BI

Published 2025-09-17 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Richardson creates a visual:

Ever wished you could see exactly how customers move through your sales funnel, or how costs flow across your business?

A Sankey Diagram makes those flows visible, showing not just totals but how values split and connect between categories.

In Power BI, the Sankey Diagram is available as a custom visual from AppSource, designed to reveal relationships and flow patterns.

There are specific times and places for Sankey charts. It requires having a natural flow in your data—that is, you need different states of data, those states should typically only “move” in one direction, you have paths to get from one state to another, and there is enough variety in pathing that not all of the data is going to the same location. The more of these rules you violate, the less useful a Sankey diagram is.

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Adding Carousel Buttons in Power BI

Published 2025-09-15 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Richardson builds a carousel:

If you’ve ever tried to cram too many charts onto one report page, you know what happens.

The page gets cluttered, users don’t know where to look, and the story you’re trying to tell gets lost.

Carousel buttons fix that problem.

Instead of stacking visuals side by side:

You place them in the same spot and let people flip through them like slides.

It feels cleaner, takes up less space, and keeps the audience focused.

Click through to see how it works. Note that carousels can be quite useful, but they also go against one of the tenets of dashboard design: glanceability. If I need to click, drag, scroll, or otherwise manipulate the dashboard before I can see the information I need to act, it’s not glanceable—I cannot gather relevant information at a glance and act upon it.

In other words, if I’m giving somebody an interactive Power BI report with the intent that the person will dig into results, then a carousel can be quite reasonable. But if I’m creating a dashboard that should be up most of the time and available for people to see, carousels aren’t a great call.

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Enabling Map Visuals in Power BI

Published 2025-09-08 by Kevin Feasel

Boniface Muchendu gets past the X:

Have you ever tried to create a map in Power BI only to see an error instead of your visualization? If your Power BI maps are not working, you’re not alone. By default, some map and filled map visuals may be disabled due to security settings. The good news? With a few quick adjustments, you can enable maps in Power BI Desktop or, if needed, in your organization’s tenant settings.

Read on to see why this visual might be disabled and how to enable it.

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Time Series Forecasting in Python

Published 2025-08-28 by Kevin Feasel

Myles Mitchell builds an ARIMA model:

In time series analysis we are interested in sequential data made up of a series of observations taken at regular intervals. Examples include:

  • Weekly hospital occupancy
  • Monthly sales figures
  • Annual global temperature

In many cases we want to use the observations up to the present day to predict (or forecast) the next N time points. For example, a hospital could reduce running costs if an appropriate number of beds are provisioned.

Read on for a primer on the topic, a quick explanation of ARIMA, and a sample implementation using several Python packages.

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Visualizing ML Model Outcomes with Matplotlib

Published 2025-08-19 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew Mayo shares a few tips:

Visualizing model performance is an essential piece of the machine learning workflow puzzle. While many practitioners can create basic plots, elevating these from simple charts to insightful, elevated visualizations that can help easily tell the story of your machine leanring model’s interpretations and predictions is a skill that sets great professionals apart. The Matplotlib library, the foundational plotting tool in the scientific and computational Python ecosystem, is packed with features that can help you achieve this.

This tutorial provides 7 practical Matplotlib tricks that will help you better understand, evaluate, and present your machine learning models. We’ll move beyond the default settings to create visualizations that are not only aesthetically pleasing but also rich in information. These techniques are designed to integrate smoothly into your workflow with libraries like NumPy and Scikit-learn.

Click through for those tips.

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Storytelling with Time Series Scatter Charts in Power BI

Published 2025-08-04 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad takes us through data changes:

Column or Bar chart can be easily used for showing a single measure’s insight across a category. Mixed charts such as Line and Column chart can be used for showing two measure and comparing their values across a set of categories. However there are some charts that can be used to show values of three measures, such as Scatter Chart. Scatter chart not only shows values of three measure across different categories, it also has a special Play axis that helps you to tell the story behind the data. In this post you’ll learn how easy is to visualize something with Scatter chart and tell a story with that. If you like to learn more about Power BI, read Power BI online book; from Rookie to Rock Star.

Read on for the blog post as well as a video version.

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Animated Maps in R with gganimate

Published 2025-08-01 by Kevin Feasel

Osheen MacOscar looks at a new version of an old package:

In this blog post, we are going to use data from the {gapminder} R package, along with global spatial boundaries from ‘opendatasoft’. We are going to plot the life expectancy of each country in the Americas and animate it to see the changes from 1957 to 2007.

The {gapminder} package we are using is from the Gapminder foundation, an independent educational non-profit fighting global misconceptions. The cover issues like global warming, plastic in the oceans and life satisfaction.

There are several common gotchas that Osheen takes us through before building an animated map of the western hemisphere.

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Building a Snowflake Dashboard that Uses Filters

Published 2025-07-30 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Wilkie does a bit of filtering:

Snowflake Dashboards can do a lot more than just show pretty numbers. Today, let’s focus on something that every data pro eventually has to deal with—filters that make navigating your dashboards less painful, especially when it comes to everyone’s favorite task: AUDITING.

Ah yes, auditing—because nothing says “data dream job” like tracing permissions. Whether it’s quarterly compliance checks or a sudden request from an overly curious auditor, somebody, at some point, will ask, “Who has access to what in Snowflake?” So let’s make that answer easy to deliver.

Click through for the process, using the development of a permissions auditing dashboard as the example.

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Building a Pareto Chart in Power BI

Published 2025-07-10 by Kevin Feasel

Boniface Muchendu creates a Pareto chart:

Creating a Pareto chart in Power BI is a powerful way to visualize the 80/20 rule in action. This type of chart helps you quickly identify the top contributors to your business metrics—whether you’re analyzing sales, categories, or customer segments. In this guide, you’ll learn how to build a dynamic Pareto chart using DAX, customize it, and apply it across different data dimensions.

Read on for the instructions.

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Bioconductor in the Wake of ggplot2 4.0.0

Published 2025-07-07 by Kevin Feasel

Maria Doyle lays it out:

A major update to ggplot2 (version 4.0.0) is expected around mid-to-late July 2025. It brings a significant internal change, replacing most of the S3 backend with the newer S7 object system. While this improves long-term maintainability and extensibility, it may break Bioconductor packages that depend on ggplot2, especially those that customise how plots are built or styled. Packages that use ggplot2 for typical plotting tasks, such as creating plots with ggplot() and geom_*(), are unlikely to be affected.

Click through for notes, tips on what to do, and whether the code you’re using will break with ggplot2 4.0.0. H/T R-Bloggers.

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