A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Devin Knight looks at the Sankey visual in Power BI:
In this module you will learn how to use the Sankey Power BI Custom Visual. The Sankey is a type of diagram that visualizes the flow of data between a source and destination.
Sankey diagrams are among the most information-dense diagrams out there. They aren’t general-purpose diagrams, but for someone willing to take the time to unpack them, they can be quite informative.
Comments closedGinger Grant notes that there are R-powered custom visuals for Power BI:
Interacting with R visuals works differently than with other report visualizations as you cannot click on elements within the visualization and filter other items on the page. Other visuals on the page will filter the data contained within the R visual. For example, let’s say my report contains a total field, a slicer which contains years and a correlation plot which contains products. If the slicker is changed to select a year, total field and the data within the R visual will change to reflect that. If on the other hand, I choose to click on the R visual to select one of the product categories, the total field will not change and the R visual will not change. The R visual’s appearance will not change in any way.
Read on for more.
Comments closedDevin Knight’s series on Power BI visuals continues with the synoptic panel:
The Synoptic Panel allows you connect areas in an image with attributes in your data model.
Using the Synoptic Designer you can convert an image that you have to one that is compatible with plotting out data points on it.
You can fill each area with a color or a saturation of a color.
The Synoptic Panel is definitely a more advanced visual, but it’s very powerful.
Comments closedIf you are looking for a tabular report you can stop here. This does not look very nice on a dashboard, however. Now I will show you how to convert this into a grouping of colorful indicators.
Remove the [Rating] field from the bottom row and create an indicator by right-clicking on the placeholder and selecting Insert > Indicator. Then select the type you would like.
There are several steps, but Derik lays it all out nicely with screenshots.
Comments closedDevin Knight looks at a new Power BI custom visual:
The Timeline is similar to the native slicer in Power BI but has several more customizations available.
Not surprising, this visual can only accept date values.
If you need to adjust the start date of the Timeline based on your works Fiscal Calendar that is possible in the format settings.
This is a pretty nice visual, but when I tried to use it, I remember it feeling a little limiting, particularly around drilling into date slices.
Comments closedDevin Knight’s Power BI custom visuals series continues:
The Scroller the values move from left to right on an animated scroll bar.
The settings allow you to customize the speed, size, status indicator and colors used.
If you’d like to see the status indicator then you must have a deviation value.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not a fan of tickers. They’re too visually noisy for my taste.
Comments closedDevin Knight has part 24 of his custom visuals series:
The Globe Map is a 3D globe visualization.
It looks similar to the technology Power Map in Excel but lacks a few features like animating the data across time.
The map can have multiple data visualization layers on top of the map like a bar chart and a heat map.
Under the right circumstances, this can be a useful visualization. I think its benefit is mostly limited to the “wow, this looks cool” effect.
Comments closedDevin Knight continues his custom visuals series with the sparkline:
Key Takeaways
Shows trends in data most often by time.
It can only visualize a single measure.
The Sparkline can be configured to animate across time.
In the right circumstances, I love sparklines. My circumstances are as follows: when you are viewing time series data for relatively few elements in which the trend is more important than the levels. In that scenario, sparklines are efficient and tell the story without extraneous numbers or clutter getting in the way.
Comments closedDevin Knight’s series on Power BI custom visuals continues with the force-directed graph:
Key Takeaways
Shows relationships between different entities in your data.
The width of the line that separate each entity represents the strength of the relationship.
Click through for the discussion and a video. I’m not too sure that I’d use this in a real dashboard, but it’s available.
Comments closedDavid Smith points out the new R Graph Gallery:
Once upon a time, there was the original R Graph Gallery, by Romain François. Sadly, it’s been unavailable for several years. Now there’s a new R Graph Gallery to fill the void, created by Yan Holtz. It contains more than 200 data visualizations categorized by type, along with the R code that created them.
You can browse the gallery by types of chart (boxplots, maps, histograms, interactive charts, 3-D charts, etc), or search the chart descriptions. Once you’ve found a chart you like, you can admire it in the gallery (and interact with it, if possible), and also find the R code which you can adapt for your own use. Some entries even include mini-tutorials describing how the chart was made. You can even submit your own graph, if you’d like to have it displayed in the gallery as well.
Looks like a good place to go to get some inspiration.
Comments closed