A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Devin 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 closedDevin Knight’s custom visuals series moves on to the next visual:
Great way to visualize and filter time data
Filtering the visual will provide a miniaturized preview of the data for the provided time period
I like this visual; you get the benefit of focus while still keeping the full picture on a time series.
Comments closedDavid Smith sheds some light on the ggiraph project:
R’s ggplot2 package is a well-known tool for producing beautiful static data visualizations that you can include in a printed report. But what if you want to include a ggplot2 graphic on a webpage and provide the ability for the user to interact with the data? The ggiraph package by David Gohel (available for installation via CRAN). WIth ggiraph, you can take an existing ggplot2 bar chart, scatterplot, boxplot, map, or many other types of chart and add one or both of the following iteractions:
Display a tooltip of your choice (e.g. data values or labels) when the cursor hovers over sections of the chart
Perform an action (a javascript function you provide: jump to another page, for example) when the viewer clicks on an element of the chart
I like it.
Comments closed