Effective reporting with Power BI
Tips and Tricks for Better Visualization
Hello Folks,
Day by day, Power Bi is quickly getting more popular among Business Analysts and other technical people.
In this article, we will explore deeper into Power-Bi and its Capabilities and Features.
Table of Contents :
- Visual Analytics 🕵️♀️
- Color variations🔵
- Importing Word cloud ☁
- Importing 325 variety of visuals ➕
- Incorporate Images 🎴
- Templates In PowerBI 📋
- Performance ✨
- Simple practices need to be followed 🤓
1. Adding Visual Analytics
On certain visuals, you can add Analytics like Trend line, Average Line, Constant Line, etc under the visualization.
- For eg: Let’s say I want to add some analytics on the Area chart shown below. The chart shows student performance by Semester.
What can you possibly add to this chart to make it look more effective?
- Constant line (Red color)— As shown in the figure, the constant line(Acting as a threshold line) indicates the min cut-off required to be maintained.
- Average Line (Yellow color) — Average line indicates the average GPA score by the student. The average line falling above the threshold line indicates a student with a good academic record.
2. Color Variations
Sometimes, it’s good to represent the values on a card/viz with a color filter. You can find it under the Data label section where you can specify a rule.
Eg: let’s apply a color rule on Graduation Score.
If the value is close to 100% it shows the green color and when the value is close to 0% it shows red color. The green color represents that the student is safe enough to graduate, while red color represents danger.
3. Importing Word Cloud and other visuals
Want to represent your data on word cloud like this one? 👇
There's no word cloud available in the visualization tab. For importing the visual you need to download the visual from the Microsoft store. Here’s the link to download the visual(Click here).
After downloading you can import the visual to the dashboard by clicking on 3 dots under the visualizations tab.
Moreover, there are so many other visuals available like:
- Dial Guage
- Tornado Chart
- Chord
- Sunburst
- Bullet chart
There are in total of 325 varieties of visuals available in the store. (Click here)
5. Incorporate Images
Humans tend to process images faster than text. You can add images to card types or also for slicers. Let me show you some examples 👇
As shown above, it’s very easy to interpret as I have added images to every card-type visuals.
As shown above, a set of images are used as slicers to filter out the report page
Images can also be used as buttons or slicers. So instead of having a dropdown slicer or a list type slicer, we can have an Image type Slicer where clicking an image will filter out the visualization or maybe a button that navigates to another report page.
6. Templates
Templates can basically be categorized into three categories:
- Simple Template
- Theme Template
- AKA Template
Simple Template
It’s basically a powerBI file that contains all meta-data for a report but doesn't contain the data itself.
Whenever you save the file as “.pbix” the data loaded in the report also gets saved. By saving the report as ”.pbit” it only saves table schema, not the actual data.
How to create a template file? 🤔
While saving a powerbi file click on save as → Template File. It will save the file as “example.pbit”.
“Notice the file extensions and file size in above image”
So next time you open a template file it will ask for a data source to connect to the report. If you didn’t select any data source to connect, it will show a blank report.
Advantages for using the template is:
- Whenever a user opens the Template File, it asks for the credentials of a data source to connect with the report. So sharing a PowerBI template file will lead to data security where no private data is shared.
- The file size is much smaller as it doesn't store the data.
Theme Template
A completely different concept of using templates in Power BI is applying colour themes to your reports. The Power BI Community portal contains a whole gallery of themes which you can access via the following link:
Select any theme from the gallery and download the “json” file. When you are building a report on PowerBI desktop, you can simply import the theme file.
Advantages of theme template:
- This is a very powerful feature of Power BI: by choosing a theme, you may adapt your Power BI reports to your corporate colors quickly and easily.
AKA Templates
When you start creating a new report, you might want to search for inspiration by looking into other reports created by experienced PowerBI users.
So AKA Templates can be very useful to jump-start with a new report.
In this case, Data Stories Gallery might help. Link 👇
Let’s say you want to build a sales analytics dashboard, so looking into other similar dashboards, provides ideas to your mind also reveals bottlenecks from the project code.
7. Performance
Performance becomes a huge issue when you have like 50K+ records and also It keeps on increasing.
How to measure the performance?
So there are many tools available where you can analyze your report performance and the performance of your data model. I have mentioned some of them here 👇
- DAX Studio
- ALM Toolkit
- Tabular Editor
- Performance Analyser in PowerBI Desktop
- Many more are mentioned on Microsoft Docs
Any tip to improve the performance?
MOST IMP — While loading the data into the model, choose columns that you plan to report on them. Don’t load unnecessary data, don’t pull columns you don’t need.
8. Daily Practices to follow
- Simplicity: Don’t go too fancy with visuals, follow the idea of delivering the message.
- Interactivity and cross-filtering capability are the finest features of powerbi
- Meaningfulness: Think about the message rather than the graphics
- Make efficient use of features like hierarchies, bookmarks, selection pane, Blank Button, filters. (Maybe another article to discuss on advanced topics)
References
- Want to Learn PowerBI Templates from the start, here’s the link to a guide:
2. Best Youtube channel to learn more tips and tricks on power-bi
https://www.youtube.com/c/GuyinaCube
👉Thank you for reading this story ❤
