Creating and Formatting Visualizations

With the report planning and design phases described in the previous chapter completed, this chapter dives into report development. This includes the creation and formatting of standard Power BI visuals such as slicers, cards, and maps as well as supporting elements such as text boxes, buttons, shapes, and images.

Visualizations are the building blocks of reports. A combination of distinct visuals, each with their own formatting and data represented at different granularities and filter contexts, enables Power BI reports to generate insights and to support data story telling. The ability to create and apply formatting to visualizations is fundamental knowledge for all report authors.

In this chapter, we review the following topics:

• The Visualizations pane
• Slicers
• Single-value visuals
• Map visuals
• Waterfall charts
• Power Platform visuals
• Premium visuals
• Elements
• Formatting visualizations...

The Visualizations pane

While in the Report view, the Visualizations pane provides the primary interface for creating and formatting visuals. The Visualizations pane includes three sub-panes, the Build visual, Format, and Analytics panes, as shown in Figure 7.1:

Figure 7.1: The Visualizations pane’s sub-panes

As shown in Figure 7.1, the Build visual sub-pane is located on the left, the Format sub-pane in the center, and the Analytics sub-pane on the right. The Analytics sub-pane is discussed in greater depth in the next chapter.

The Build visual sub-pane, as its name suggests, is used for creating visuals. By default, 40 icons representing different visualization types are displayed and can be used to create visuals. In addition, when a visual is selected on the report page, the Build visual sub-pane presents one or more field wells used to configure the visual as shown in Figure 7.2:

Figure 7.2: Field wells

Field wells are simply areas where columns...

Slicers

Slicer visuals are interactive controls added to the report canvas to enable report users to apply their own filter selections to an individual report page. Given their power and flexible support for multiple data types, slicers have been a staple of Power BI interactive reports for years.

Slicers are a central element of self-service functionality in Power BI in addition to the visual interaction behavior described in the previous chapter. The standard slicer visual displays the unique values of a single column enabling report users to apply their own filter selections to all or some visuals on a report page.

However, although slicer visuals are still fully supported and a great addition to many reports, Power BI now also supports a Filters pane that can be exposed to users to deliver essential self-service filtering without requiring additional report canvas space or additional queries. Given the availability and advantages of the Filters pane, report authors should...

Single-value visuals

Single-value visuals are a class of visuals which prominently display an important value such as the YTD Sales or the % Variance to Plan. These visuals are typically positioned at the top and left sections of report pages and are commonly pinned to dashboards in the Power BI service. Though simple relative to other visuals, single value visuals are often the first visuals users perceive and these values relative to their expectations determine whether or not other visuals in the report are analyzed.

The Card visual

Card visuals present a single Fields field well that accepts a single column or measure. Card visuals are most often used to prominently display a single numeric value, such as an important business metric. While perhaps more limited and visually unappealing than the KPI and Gauge visual, Card visuals are valued for their simplicity and ability to drive data alerts within the Power BI service.

That said, Card visuals do include the ability...

Map visuals

Power BI currently provides five map visuals including the Map, Filled map, Shape map (in preview), Azure map (in preview), and the ArcGIS Maps for Power BI.

The map visual plots location points as bubbles over a world map and varies the size of the bubbles based on a value. The bubbles on these maps can also be broken out across a dimension to provide additional context.

The Filled map and Shape map visuals are forms of heat maps that use color and color intensity to distinguish specific areas of a map by a value, such as postal codes by population.

The Azure map visual is similar to the map visual in that it displays bubbles on a world map. The Azure map supports different base layers like satellite and road as well as many different settings including a display of live traffic data. While still in preview, continued enhancements to this visual could position the Azure Map as the standard for geospatial analysis in Power BI.

The ArcGIS map visual is...

Waterfall chart

The waterfall chart is one of the most powerful standard visuals in Power BI given its ability to compute and format the variances of individual items between two periods by default.

The items representing the largest variances are displayed as columns of varying length, sorted and formatted with either an increase (green), no change (yellow), or decrease (red) color. This built-in logic and conditional formatting make waterfall charts both easy to create and intuitive for users.

In Figure 7.19, the Internet Net Sales of the last two completed months are broken down by SalesTerritoryCountry:

Figure 7.19: Waterfall chart with breakdown

The waterfall chart in Figure 7.19 was created by placing the Internet Net Sales measure applied to the Values field well, and placing the Year Month and SalesTerritoryCountry columns into the Category and Breakdown input fields, respectively. The waterfall chart naturally walks the user from the starting point...

Power Platform visuals

Power BI is part of a larger suite of products known as the Power Platform. In addition to Power BI, the Power Platform is comprised of Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents.

The Power Platform is designed to support low-code and no code development by business analysts familiar with MS Office tools like Excel but is also extensible to support complex, custom solutions involving application development skills and processes. Power Automate is used to design and run workflows and Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Finally, Power Virtual Agents provides a platform for creating intelligent, automated agents.

Over the last few years, Microsoft has worked steadily to create seamless integration between the various Power Platform tools as well as Dataverse, Microsoft’s business data object/entity store. In terms of Power BI, this has meant the introduction of standard visuals for Power Apps and Power Automate, thus enabling Power BI report...

Premium visuals

As Microsoft’s Power BI Premium offering has matured, Microsoft has added two standard Power BI visuals that support features exclusive to capacity-based Power BI licenses, including Power BI Premium and Premium Per User (PPU). These visuals are the Scorecard visual and the Paginated report visual.

We begin by looking at the Scorecard visual.

Scorecard

Scorecards are a relatively recent addition to Power BI that support the display and tracking of Goals within Power BI Premium and PPU. Goals allow you to create and track multiple key business metrics and objectives in a single place via a Scorecard. Both Goals and Scorecards are covered in more detail in later chapters.

Figure 7.26 shows an unconfigured Scorecard visual added to a Power BI report page.

Figure 7.26: Scorecard visual

As shown in Figure 7.26, two options are present, Create new scorecard and Connect to an existing scorecard. Figure 7.27 shows the same visual after...

Elements

In addition to visuals, Power BI Desktop includes the ability to add elements such as text boxes, shapes, images, and buttons to report pages.

Elements can be added to report pages using the Insert tab of the ribbon when in the Report view as shown in Figure 7.30:

Figure 7.30: Select paginated report

Elements share common traits and features. For example, buttons, shapes, and images all include the ability to activate a bookmark when clicked on as demonstrated in the Custom labels and the back button and Custom report navigation sections of the previous chapter.

In addition, selecting a text box, button, shape, or image on a report page replaces the Visualizations pane with a Format text box, Format button, Format shape, and Format image pane respectively. This pane works identically to the Format sub-pane of the Visualizations pane as described in the Visualizations pane section earlier in this chapter.

Elements are often used as navigation features...

Formatting visualizations

One of the final steps in report development is configuring the formatting options for each visual. Several of these options, such as data labels, background colors, borders, and titles are common to all visuals and are often essential to aid comprehension. Several other formatting options, such as fill point for scatter charts, are exclusive to particular visuals and report authors are well served to be familiar with these features.

In addition to giving reports a professional appearance, features such as tooltips can be used to provide visuals with additional or supporting context. Furthermore, formatting features can be used to implement conditional logic to dynamically drive the color of data points by their values.

We start by exploring how Tooltips can aid in providing additional context and insights to report viewers.

Tooltips

Chart and map visuals include a Tooltips field well in the Visualizations pane to allow report authors to...

Summary

Building on the foundation of the previous chapter regarding Power BI report planning, this described how to create and format the basic building blocks of reports, Power BI visualizations. We initially provided an overview of the Visualizations pane that is foundational to building and formatting visuals, introduced the configuration and utility of numerous standard visuals and elements, and finally provided numerous examples of important formatting functionality such as conditional formatting, Sparklines, and custom format strings.

The following chapter builds upon the foundational knowledge of this chapter to introduce more advanced visualizations, analytics, and mobile support.

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