Creating Comic Book People Using Power BI
Power BI is a great data visualization platform in weaving actionable data stories. But did you ever imagine a Power BI dashboard conveying a data story conveying an emotional data story with comics? In this post, we are going to learn how to create a comic data story using Power BI’s ComicGen Visual from Power BI App Store
Data Visualization is meant for simplifying the consumption of data, hence better decision making. As humans, our minds instinctively respond to human emotions more than anything else. Comics with emotions convey the insights in a more intuitive way and make the stories easier to consume. Emotional data stories are more engaging and understood quickly. Can we use this instinctive response to our advantage when communicating insights from data using Power BI?
Comic Gen Visual
The ComicGen custom visual allows you to show one of two characters (Dee or Dey) in a variety of poses, and with a range of emotions. Excitingly, the poses and emotions can interpret your data into relatable gestures. The emotions, poses, angles, and dialogues of the comic characters can be driven by data in Power BI.
We can set ‘Emotions’ or/and ‘Poses’ to static or ‘Data-Driven’ in Comic settings. The list of emotions includes normal, laugh, sad, wink, angry, worried, surprised. The list of poses includes pointing “right”, “pointing up”, “yuhoo”, “super-perfect”, etc. An example of the “Dee” comic character is depicted below, with afraid emotion and angry-frustrated pose
The sample data on which the emotion of the above comic changes, tracks a hypothetical superstore’s orders and returned products by different dimensions and metrics, category, sub-category, revenue, profit, cost, and ordered-locations. We would use the aggregated changes in sales and profit of ordered products, drill into them by category, sub-category, and product level. All these changes link to the personas of our characters and change how they react to it.
Steps to create comic data stories in Power BI
Step 1
Explore it for yourself by downloading the Data from here.
Import ‘Comicgen’ custom visual from Microsoft market place into your Power BI desktop file.
Step 2
Import the superstore data into Power BI and create a simple visualization The visualization depicts:
- Sales which is aggregated — higher the sales, higher the bar height. This is on primary Y-Axis
- Profit (aggregated) — The color of the bars is driven by profit scale, i.e. color divergent; more red — lesser profit (or losses) and more green — higher profits
- Shipping Cost — The line curve depicts the shipping cost, this is on secondary Y-Axis.
- The x-axis is a composite shared axis — Product Category, Sub-Category and Product. The elements can be drilled up or down, hence hierarchical in nature.
Note: In this post, we are not focusing on how to build the existing charts of Power BI but our focus is on the comic plugin KPI integration
Step 3
Create DAX measures in Power BI for ‘Pose’ and ‘Emotion’ as required. The values used here, can be changed as required.
ProfitEmotion = IF(CALCULATE(SUM(Orders[Profit])) > 20000, "laugh", "sad")SalesPose = IF(CALCULATE(SUM(Orders[Sales])) > 500000, "superperfect", "angryfrustrated")
Step 4
Import the comic-gen visual, two instances of them. Drag and drop the created measures into respective data fields of the comic-gen visual as shown below.
Let’s name one comic-gen has “Dee” and other as “Dey”
Let “Dee” be the Finance Executive, who needs to keep a watch on product profits; and let “Dey” be the Sales Manager who is focused on the products revenue.
In the comic setting for both, lets set the emotion and pose respectively.
"Dee" → Comic Settings → Pose → Holding Laptop (static)"Dee" → Comic Settings → Emotion → Data Driven (hence this will pick up "Profit Emotion" measure)"Dey" → Comic Settings → Pose → Data Driven (hence this will pick up "SalesPose" measure)"Dey" → Comic Settings → Emotion → Normal (static)
The above configuration implies “Dee” Finance Executive will be sad when profits go low, and “Dey” Sales Manager will be frustrated when sales go low, else they would react fine/normal
And there you go, comic characters are reacting to your data defined.
Observations about Comic Gen Feature
- Good for providing sentiments on the data.
- Simple to use.
- Surely need professional comic. Say like a banker, farmer, animal or ability put our own pics will surely improve the usage
- Lag is there when emotions need to change, based on data
- The visuals are available here
