A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Patrick LeBlanc pulls out the thesaurus:
Most struggle with getting Q&A to be effective in Power BI. Usually this comes down to either model naming or synonyms. Patrick shows you how you can update these and also a nice feature to let you share them with others.
I’ve found the Power BI Q&A component to be a bit tetchy, even with synonyms, when you’re asking for non-trivial slices of the data. Still, what Patrick shows does help a lot.
Comments closedPrathy Kamasani gives us options:
A colleague of mine came to me with an interesting use case, “ Switch between a summarized value or selected value with multiple legends”. For example, I have five countries and their GDP values. When the end user goes to the report, the user would like to see the average GDP of all countries, but when the user selects single or multiple countries on the slicers, the line chart should show only selected values.
Click through for the guide.
Comments closedAmy Esselman hits on a tricky problem with dashboards:
As powerful and as useful as dashboards are, they’re optimized for the exploration of data, not the communication of specific insights. Once we’ve used our dashboards to uncover something worth sharing, we’ll usually be better served by making a separate presentation, designed to bring the findings to light and get others to act upon the information.
The path from dashboard to story might not always be intuitive. This article will use a dashboard from a recent storytelling with data engagement to illustrate how to transform dashboard insights into an action-inspiring story.
This is especially important if you’re a developer who understand the value of storytelling but doesn’t quite know how to support it while showing arbitrary data.
Comments closedSebastian Sauer takes us through an interesting scenario.
No lede here because it’s almost 100% code and headers. A quick description of this is that we can see ways to parse columns in an R DataFrame and plot visuals without hard-coding the column name in our plot definition, using a variable instead.
And I had to rewrite the synopsis above because I used the data science term “variable” until hitting a wall when describing the programming term “variable.”
Comments closedThomas Williams waits for the keystroke:
This R Markdown snippet demonstrates “debouncing”: waiting until a user stops changing an input, before updating dependent charts and tables. Debouncing is often used in web sites to prevent the user interface “jumping” as data is being entered, especially when the update takes a noticeable amount of time – for instance calling an API or database, or doing a calculation.
Read on to see an abridged example, as well as a link to the full version.
Comments closedKristyna Hughes recaps a presentation:
To turn our millions of dollars worth of data into actionable insights, we need to tell a story with it. Why a story? Storytelling has been and is a vital way humans understand and share the world around them. If numbers were as interesting and memorable as stories, our classic works of art would be the Pythagorean theorem instead of the Iliad and Odyssey. Listening to a story engages multiple parts of the brain, which is why listening to your great aunt’s story for hours is exhausting, but also why stories are more memorable. Here are the parts of the brain engaged when you hear a story:
There’s a lot to digest in this post, including ways to convert storytelling into data-driven insights.
Comments closedVowel sounds can be visualized in a two-dimensional space according to tongue position. The vertical axis is runs from open down to closed, and the horizontal runs from front to back. See a linguistics textbook for far more detail.
English has five vowel letters, but a lot more than five vowel sounds. Scholars argue about how many vowel sounds English and other languages have because there’s room for disagreement on how much two sounds can differ and still be considered variations on the same sound. The IPA Handbook [1] lists 11 vowel sounds in American English, not counting diphthongs.
Click through for comparative charts and some bonus expertise in the comments.
Comments closedThomas Williams has a change of font:
Setting a different font is a minor tweak to an R Markdown file that might help it fit better with a corporate or company look. Google Fonts is an industry-accepted method to reference fonts on web pages and can be used with R Markdown rendered by Shiny. There’s no need to download anything while developing the R Markdown file in RStudio, or viewing it in a web browser from a Shiny server.
I’ve recently used this technique to integrate the “Atkinson Hyperlegible” font, a font with “…greater legibility and readability for low vision readers…” from https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont. Since Shiny themes already specify a font, the steps below show how to override that with the Google Font, demo’d with the
spacelabShiny theme.
Click through to see how you can use this font, as well as others, in Shiny apps.
Comments closedWant to display visual-left hint to perplexed users that explains what your visual is supposed to reveal? Like me, you have missed the handy Power BI help tooltips feature that allows you to pop up some helpful text for each visual.
This works best for blocks of information a person needs to see once. Rather than it showing up every time you visit the page, make it available via a tooltip. You’ll want to make sure the tooltip is readily visible for people new to the report but not so overwhelming that it annoys people who already know how this thing works. That, however, is a completely different challenge.
Comments closedThomas Williams wants to improve the user experience:
Recently I needed to reload a parameter, without reloading the page. The parameter was bound to a data frame, where end-users selected a value and then I looked up other fields in the data frame further down the page (for example, a name was selected, but I wanted the identifier from the same record). It wasn’t exactly intuitive, so here’s how I did it.
Click through for code and explanation.
Comments closed