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Category: Visualization

Ribbon Charts

Published 2017-09-29 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad explains what ribbon charts are and why it’s good that they’re now available in Power BI:

Ribbon Chart shows bigger value in each column at the top, then the next value comes after. Look at the sales amount value for female and male in 2005 and 2006. In 2005, Female (Black) had more sales than Male. However, in 2006, Male (Green) generated more revenue than the female, so it is on the top for the 2006 column.

The main benefit of the ribbon chart is in this re-ordering, so it’s easier to tell which categories are largest in a specific time period.

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Visualizing A Single Number

Published 2017-09-21 by Kevin Feasel

Tim Bock shows a dozen methods for visualizing a single number:

There are a number of situations in which it can be advantageous to create a visualization to represent a single number:

  • To communicate with less numerate viewers/readers;

  • Infographics and dashboards commonly use one important number;

  • To attract the attention of distracted or busy viewers/readers;

  • To add some humanity or “color”, to create an emotional connection;

  • Or to increase the redundancy of the presentation (see Improve the Quality of Data Visualizations Using Redundancy).

To a great extent, my favorite is the first.  There are good cases for many of the others—primarily the shock value of the uncountable pictogram—but typically, the best visualization is simple.

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Polar Charts In Power BI With R

Published 2017-09-19 by Kevin Feasel

Leila Etaati shows how to build a polar chart in Power BI using an R component:

I just add a layer to the above furmula “coord_polar()” this function also has been used for creating pie charts. it gets the “theta” variable, in below example I put theta=y axis, so we have below charts

Normally I don’t much like this type of polar chart, though I’m a big fan of radar charts, which follow a similar concept.

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Transit Data Visualization In R

Published 2017-09-12 by Kevin Feasel

Goncalo Trincao Cunha shows us how to plot General Transit Feed Specification data in R:

GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) is a specification that defines a data format for public transportation routes, stop, schedules, and associated geographic information.

In this post, we’ll use R with ggplot2 and ggmap to visualize GTFS route and schedule information on a map.

This post uses a GTFS feed from CARRIS, which is a bus public transport operator from the city of Lisbon.

Click through for code and a few interesting maps of Lisbon, Portugal.

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Comparing Baselines Using Power BI

Published 2017-08-24 by Kevin Feasel

Melissa Connors shows how to take baseline data from SentryOne and visualize it within Power BI:

Using Power BI to connect to multiple baselines in SentryOne allows me to make fast comparisons. I previously translated baseline values into charts manually or through some Excel/SQL Server connections. See this post on data compression as an example. I wanted to compare performance between different compression levels (None, Row, and Page), and include the Average, Minimum, Maximum, and Standard Deviation values. Now, I have a standard template that looks better in Power BI. Once I create a baseline in my database, I have access to it in my charts. If you don’t have Power BI, you can use the query from this post in Excel or another reporting method for your comparisons.

Even if you don’t use SentryOne, the principles are generally applicable.

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Limiting Color Usage On Dashboard Charts

Published 2017-08-07 by Kevin Feasel

Jesse Gorter explains why you shouldn’t overwhelm your dashboard chart users with colors:

In this example we use a signal color for the past too. Do you notice how the usage of green distracts from the current week which is a red? This suggest we are doing great overall even though at this time, we are doing not so great. It is up to you to decide what you want to communicate. If you are a sports team showing the rank during the season, only the current position would be important. In sales, having 30 weeks of outstanding sales above the target and the current week selling slightly under, it would make sense to show the signal color for the past.

Not to mention making it easier for people with CVD to read your report, something with which the red-green scheme does not do great.

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The Great Custom Visual Move

Published 2017-07-31 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant runs into a problem with some of the custom visuals (not) in the Office Store:

This week I decided to do a demo using the Aquarium custom visual.  As readers of my blog know, I have used the custom visual before, but it has been a while and I have changed PCs since then.  No worries I can always go download the visual from the store, right? Wrong. The aquarium visual is not available on the new store. Neither is Image Viewer, if one is looking to add that into your latest Power BI report it is not available. What happened?

Read on to learn why the aquarium is missing.  RIP aquarium (hopefully only temporarily).

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