Rob Collie has a new dashboard for you:
So I’ll just leave these here. Yes, these images are all Power BI. They are all clickable links to interactive pages.
It’s fun to click through and gives you some ideas of what Power BI can do.
Comments closedCategory: Visualization
Chris Webb shows how you can use custom formats to display numbers more easily in Power BI:
Now that we can apply custom format strings to fields and measures in Power BI in the September 2019 release, I thought it would be useful to provide some examples of what’s possible with this very flexible new feature because the existing documentation for VBA isn’t easy to make sense of. In fact there’s so much to say I’m going to have to write a series of blog posts to cover everything! In this first post I’m going to look at formatting numbers.
When you need an exact number, a thousands separator goes a long way.
Comments closedLaura Ellis shows how you can build maps full of little icons:
That was ok, but we should try to make the images more aesthetically pleasing using the magick package. We make each image transparent with the image_transparent() function. We can also make the resulting image a specific color with image_colorize().
I then saved the images using the image_write() function. I manually re-uploaded them to GH.
This was a great example of where laying icons on a map works.
Comments closedI presumed the graph would depict cancellation rates for a set of products, with “Tier 2 with Promotion” at the top, representing the highest cancellation rate. When we get to the data, though, that’s not the case. Rather, the graph shows the inverse metric (retention rate) with Tier 2 + Promo as the bottom line with the lowest retention rate. Eventually I figured this out—but only because I spent time studying the data to make this determination!
Click through for the initial visual as well as a couple of alternatives.
Comments closedDavid 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 closed