Category: Visualization

Devin Knight continues his Power BI custom visuals series:

In addition, to seeing where the high and low distribution of values are you will also find the Box and Whisker will provide:

• A count of values

• Maximum

• Minimum

• Average

• Median

• Range of values

A simple box and whisker chart goes a long way.

Devin Knight continues his custom visuals series:

In this module you will learn how to use the Sankey Bar Chart Power BI Custom Visual.  The Sankey Bar Chart is used to show a flow of data between different stages of a process.

It’s an interesting mix of sankey, bar chart, and funnel.  In other words, you may only have one thing you can use it for, but it’ll be a really good use.

Reza Rad explains how to sort a column by another column’s value in Power BI visuals:

Problem happens when you want a Text field to be ordered based on something different than the value of the field. For example if you look at above chart you can see that months ordered from April to September. This is not order of months, this is alphabetical order. If you change the sorting of visual, it will only change it from A to Z, or Z to A. To make it in the order of month numbers you have to do it differently.

Read on for the solution.

Devin Knight shows off the horizontal funnel Power BI custom visual:

In this module you will learn how to use the Horizontal Funnel Power BI Custom Visual.  The Horizontal Funnel functions somewhat similar to the traditional funnel but it allows you to display a secondary measure and has a few more customizations than you would normally get. You’ll find that the Horizontal Funnel is great for displaying a flow of data.

One of the better non-sales uses of funnels I’ve seen is tracking completion rates on multi-page forms or multi-step processes.  If you see a huge drop-off at one step in the process, it might indicate a bug in the form or some incongruity with the end user’s expectation.

Devin Knight shows off the linear gauge custom visual in Power BI:

In this module you will learn how to use the Linear Gauge Power BI Custom Visual.  The Linear Gauge would often be used to visualize a KPI. It gives you the ability to compare an actual vs target as well as showing up to two trend lines.

This can be a very useful visual.  The tricky part is that the bars aren’t scaled the same, so when your eyes want to compare bar lengths, it can get a little confusing.

Devin Knight explains the dial gauge custom visual:

• The effectiveness of gauges on dashboards is an often debated topic.

• The Dial Gauge is completely data driven. Which means not only must your measure (drives the needle) come from a dataset but also the different thresholds ranges must come from your dataset too.

• There are no specific Format settings for the Dial Gauge, which does limit you a bit with what you can do with this gauge.

There are certain scenarios in which I think the dial gauge works well.  The best scenario is the the same as its analog counterpart:  when you are measuring a single continuous variable with a safe range and meaningful range differences.  This scenario occurs less often than you might think.

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.