A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
David Eldersveld shows how you can use orthographic projection in Power BI:
The projection from three coordinates to a 2D plane is achieved by adding the following two measures. Be sure to adjust the column references and what-if parameter names at the top to correspond to your own data.
Here’s my “Ortho x” measure. The initial six bold values are what you’d need to adjust to your own data and parameter names.
David lays out a face, which is pretty neat.
Comments closedMarc Lelijveld continues a series on storytelling with Power BI:
Progressive disclosure
It is all about giving that little bit more insights which can be done in many ways. For example, you want to show the sales by product category, which you’ve put in a bar chart. Looking at these bars, you might be interested in the number of manufactures involved in these sales amounts for product category. You can create a stacked barchart representing the different manufacturers in a legend. Or you can use another chart in your report to represent the top 5 products, which will interact with the sales over time chart. But both options will use additional space on your report canvas and look a bit messy, which can distract the users of where it is all about.
Marc is wrapping up the series and it’s worth the read.
Comments closedThomas Lin Pedersen has an update to ggraph:
If you are new to ggraph, a short description follows: It is an extension of ggplot2 that implement an extended grammar for relational data (e.g. trees and networks). It provides a huge variety of geoms for drawing nodes and edges, along with an assortment of layouts making it possible to produce a very wide range of network visualization types. It is to my knowledge the most feature packed network visualization framework available in R (and potentially in other languages as well), all building on top of the familiar ggplot2 API. If you want to learn more I invite you to browse the new pkgdown website that has been made available.
It looks really nice.
Comments closedMark Lelijveld continues a series on storytelling with Power BI:
In the below report you can easily click on a country on the left side to move to another page. When it comes to interactivity it is all done right! On the right top you can also filter on order date. Let’s say we apply a filter to only see the sales up to the end of 2013. This results in a sales amount of nearly $ 319K.
Now, Germany gets my attention. I want to see more and decide to navigate to the other page by clicking on Germany. Ending up at the other page, I see that the sales amount changes back to $2.3M. In other words, my filter is gone!
Much of the difference between adequacy and excellence with visualization is in this kind of polish.
Comments closedMarc Lelijveld continues a series on storytelling with Power BI:
Many times, I see reports with loads of visuals on the pages. This results in both a really poor performance, as well as the end user has no clue what the key message is of this report. You can always ask yourself, is this visual necessary to show on this page? What does it add to this page? Is this really needed? If not, remove it! If the visual does add some value, is it needed on this page? Maybe it is only distracting the user of where the report is about.
A good approach can be to put certain visuals on a different page or hide them by default until the user interacts with the report. Within the interaction, you will have multiple options in Power BI to interact with your user.
There’s a lot more to it, so read on.
Comments closedThomas Lin Pedersen has some ggforce updates for us:
Now, the above plot has some obvious shortcomings. The diagonal is pretty useless for starters, and it is often that these panels are used to plot the distributions of the individual variables. Using e.g.
geom_density()won’t work as it always start at 0, thus messing with the y-scale of each row. ggforce provides two new geoms tailored for the diagonal:geom_autodensity()andgeom_autohistogram()which automatically positions itself inside the panel without affecting the y-scale. We’d still need to have this geom only in the diagonal, butfacet_matrix()provides exactly this sort of control
There are some interesting improvements in here.
Comments closedAndy Kirk has a few tips to help you design for people who have deuteronopia or protanopia:
Many visualisations use colours to represent data values, either to show quantitative scales or categorical classifications. One of the most common colour metaphors used in visual displays involves the use of a red-green colour scheme, sometimes known as “RAG” or “traffic light” colours. These colours are used to convey notions of green = ‘good’ or ‘above average’ and red = ‘bad’ or ‘below average’ in some cultures, and the reverse in others. Such colour connotations are long-established and widely used, especially in financial or corporate contexts, but whilst they provide a certain immediacy in their meaning for many viewers, around 4.5% of the population are colour-blind (8% of men) with the red-green colour deficiency “Deuteranopia” being the most common form. This means a significant proportion of viewers may not be able to perceive important such visual encodings.
I’m not the biggest fan of some of them, but there are some really good ideas in here.
Comments closedMarc Lelijveld continues a series on storytelling with Power BI:
Another thing to think about before building visuals, is the click path. In order to make sure we’re really telling the story, we need to get our click path in a logical order. This is most important for both, declarative and exploratory storytelling.
Maybe you want to provide all the information in your visuals right away. Sometimes I see things like this happening when people add a lot of visuals on only one page. In my experience it is better to make your report interactive and work with multiple pages. Spread the story you want to tell out over multiple pages. This is what Will Thompson also has done as well in this report for the Gartner Bakeoff in 2018.
This sort of planning helps you out in the long run.
Comments closedBartosz Ratajczyk continues a quest to draw SSIS packages as SVGs:
To get the
ValueandExpressionproperties I need to find the precedence constraint in the.dtsxfile during the XSL transformations. It requires three changes in thepackage2svg.xsl:– I have to pass the name of the
.dtsxfile
– I have to read the XML from the.dtsxfile
– I have to use theDTSnamespace because it’s the namespace of the .dtsx file
Read on for more. Bartosz to this point has covered the control flow.
Comments closedMarc Lelijveld continues a series on storytelling with Power BI:
As said, being dynamic is a broad concept. Lets use the above shown example. As a report author, we can define that the end-user should be looking at an top 10 ranking of countries (right side of the report). Since the difference between number 9 and 10 in the ranking is so small, you might want to know what the difference is to number 11. Now, we can’t see that. We need to change the filter context to see the rest of the ranking.
Click through for a step by step example of what to do.
Comments closed