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Category: Visualization

Building Charts from Powershell

Published 2024-05-28 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan builds a chart:

There are plenty of ways to visualize data. There’s PowerBI, Tableu, and a plethora of other options. What about taking the results of a SQL query and creating a graph in PowerShell? Probably not ideal, but is it possible? Let’s see what this might look like.

The thought occurred to me more out of curiosity than it being something I’d use. Admittedly, I’m not proficient enough in PowerShell to quickly build something from scratch. To get an idea of how it might look, I took this as an opportunity to outsource most of the work to Microsoft Copilot to see if I would get anything useful.

If you want to get fancy, I’d recommend Plotly, which has support for the best .NET language (F#) and you can also use it with those other .NET languages (C#, Powershell). There’s no explicit quickstart for Powershell but you can Powershell-itize the C# code pretty easily.

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Previewing the Power BI Button Slicer Visual

Published 2024-05-13 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad checks out a new visual:

The Button Slicer is one of the recent visuals that is very helpful in taking your report layout and visualization to the next level. Although this visual has been available for some time, many are still unfamiliar with its features. In this article and video, I’ll take you through this visual, its features, and how you can use them to have a better Power BI report layout.

Read on to see how (at least until it’s out of preview) you can get access to the visual, as well as what you can do with it.

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Filtering a Visual by a Measure via a Slicer in Power BI

Published 2024-05-02 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria solves a problem:

Have you ever wanted to filter a visual by selecting a range of values for a measure? You may have found that you cannot populate a slicer with a measure. But you can do this another way.

I have a report that shows project expenses and budgets. I want users to be able to filter the list of project to only those which have expenses within my selected range. I also have 2 other slicers for project budget and percent of budget used, but let’s just focus on the expense amount slicer.

Read on to see how.

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Visualizing a Spark Execution Plan

Published 2024-05-01 by Kevin Feasel

Gerhard Brueckl builds a very helpful tool:

I recently found myself in a situation where I had to optimize a Spark query. Coming from a SQL world originally I knew how valuable a visual representation of an execution plan can be when it comes to performance tuning. Soon I realized that there is no easy-to-use tool or snippet which would allow me to do that. Though, there are tools like DataFlint, the ubiquitous Spark monitoring UI or the Spark explain() function but they are either hard to use or hard to get up running especially as I was looking for something that works in both of my two favorite Spark engines being Databricks and Microsoft Fabric.

Read on for Gerhard’s answer, including an example of it in action.

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Adding GIFs to Power BI Reports

Published 2024-04-30 by Kevin Feasel

Riqo Chaar adds a bit of motion to cards:

This article will describe the process behind adding GIFs to card visuals in Power BI. The GIFs we will create in this article will be as follows: animated arrows, looping only once, displaying the direction of movement relating to a particular value between the current period and the previous period. These GIFs work extremely well as a visual aid, highlighting key information quickly to users, without any overstimulating effect due to a single loop being used.

This article was inspired by a video from the YouTube channel, How to Power BI.

Click through for the article. I’m pretty well on the fence about this: adding GIFs is not something I would think to do, primarily because of the distraction factor. Even so, it’s still good to know that it’s possible.

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Evenly Spacing Month Charts in ggplot2

Published 2024-04-29 by Kevin Feasel

Jameson Marriott fixes a spacing issue:

I recently noticed that ggplot2 spaces date axes literally even when grouped by month. I’ve been using ggplot2 extensively for years and I don’t remember noticing before, so this is not really a big deal, but now that I know it bugs me a lot. Take a look below.

I don’t think I had noticed this before either, though now that Jameson has pointed it out, it certainly is annoying. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Building a Pareto Chart in Power BI

Published 2024-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

Riqo Chaar get more than 80% of the way there:

The Pareto principle, commonly referred to as the 80/20 rule, is a concept of prioritisation.

It states that for many outcomes, 80% of the outputs are derived from 20% of the inputs. Although this isn’t a universal truth, this pattern has been observed in many different cases. For example, a large proportion (80%) of the revenue a particular business generates may primarily be associated with only a small proportion (20%) of big-selling products. This concept is related to the law of diminishing returns and poses the following question: If, after reaching a certain level of output (80%), significantly more effort is required to achieve further increases in this output, is this additional effort worth it?

In this article, we demonstrate the process (using DAX expressions) of creating a Pareto chart in Power BI.

Read on to see how you can build a chart like this. It’s a very popular style of chart for manufacturing scenarios.

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The Value of Multiple Graphs

Published 2024-04-10 by Kevin Feasel

Alex Velez shares some advice:

A tip I regularly share when providing data visualization feedback is to use multiple graphs instead of packing several series into a single chart. Although it is important to be concise, people are often surprised to hear that when it comes to the number of graphs we share, fewer isn’t always better.

Read on for the advice. It makes a lot of sense for several reasons, as Alex shares. One additional reason is that it goes toward Edward Tufte’s argument about information density: multiple smaller visuals allow you to put more relevant information into the same amount of physical space. This makes your visuals more impactful as a result.

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