Planning Power BI Reports

Effective and sustainable Power BI reports and Power BI solutions more generally reflect thoughtful planning and process. To this end, this chapter contains foundational concepts and features to support the design of Power BI reports including visualization best practices, report filter scopes, and Live connections to Power BI datasets.

In this chapter, we review the following topics:

• Report planning process
• Visualization best practices
• Choosing the right visual
• Visual interactions
• Drillthrough report pages
• Report filter scopes
• Bookmarks
• Live connections to Power BI datasets
• Report design summary

Before jumping into creating visuals, it is important to properly plan reports in order to ensure a good user experience and maximize the value to the business. Thus, we’ll first take a look at the report planning process.

Report planning process

Power BI reports can take on a variety of forms and use cases, ranging from executive-level dashboard layouts to highly detailed and focused reports.

Prior to designing and developing Power BI reports, some level of planning and documentation is recommended to ensure that the reports are well aligned with the needs of the users and the organization.

Effective report planning can be encapsulated in the following six steps:

1. Identify the audience
2. Define the business questions to answer
3. Confirm that the dataset supports the business questions
4. Determine interactivity
5. Define access and distribution
6. Sketch the report layout

Let’s look at each of these steps in turn, starting with identifying report users.

Identify the audience

When developing reports, the report author should have a clear understanding of the different consumers of the report and their priorities and use cases.

For example...

Visualization best practices

Effective reports are much more than simply answering documented business questions with the available measures and columns of the dataset. Reports also need to be visually appealing and provide a logical structure that aids in navigation and readability. Business users of all backgrounds appreciate a report that is clear, concise, and aesthetically pleasing.

Now that the report planning phase described is complete, the following list of 15 visualization best practices can guide the report development process:

1. Avoid clutter and minimize non-essential details: Each visual should align with the purpose of the report—to gain insight into a business question. Visualizations should not represent wild guesses or functionality that the author finds interesting.

   Eliminate report elements that aren’t essential for improving understanding. Gridlines, legends, axis labels, text boxes, and images can often be limited or removed. The report...

Choosing the right visual

With the report planning phase completed, an essential task of the report author is to choose the visual(s) best suited to gain insight into the particular questions within the scope of the report. The choice of the visualization type, such as a column chart or a matrix visual, should closely align with the most important use case, the message to deliver, and the data relationship to represent.

Visualization types have distinct advantages in terms of visual perception and types of data relationships such as part-to-whole and comparisons. Additionally, although several formatting options are common to all visuals, certain options such as the line style (solid, dashed, or dotted) of a line chart are exclusive to specific visuals.

A standard visual selection process is as follows:

1. Plan and document the business question(s) and related measures and dimension columns
2. Determine whether a table, a chart, or both are needed to best visualize...

Visual interactions

Power BI reports are highly interactive by nature, allowing users to click on data points within visuals and cross-filter or highlight other filters on the page. When planning and designing reports, it is important to keep this default behavior in mind and consider whether or not the default visual interaction behavior should be changed.

By default, the filter selections applied to a single visual, such as clicking a bar on a column chart or a row on a table, impact all other data visualizations on the given report page with relationships to the selection.

In Figure 6.8, the bar representing the United States sales territory country has been selected and this causes the product category chart to highlight the portion of each product category related to the United States sales territory country ($45M):

Figure 6.8: Visual interactions – Highlighting

Multiple values from the same column can be selected (for example, France and Canada)...

Drillthrough report pages

A well-designed Power BI report of summary-level visualizations may itself sufficiently address user questions. However, it’s often the case that users need the ability to view the details behind particular data points of interest, such as the sales orders for a specific product, customer, or fiscal period that seems high or low relative to expectations.

Drillthrough report pages are typically hidden by default and accessed via the right-click context menu of visuals for items of interest, such as an individual bar on a bar chart. These report pages enable users to continue and often complete their own analysis at a detailed level and thus can reduce the need to create or support traditional paginated or extract-like detail reports.

As per Figure 6.10, a report page has been designed with a drillthrough filter set to the Product Name column. This drillthrough page automatically applies filters from the source report page’s Product Name...

Report filter scopes

Within Power BI Desktop, the Filters pane provides access to three different filter scopes, filters on all pages, filters on the current page, and filters on the current visual. In addition, a fourth filter scope can be set in the Visualizations pane, using drillthrough filters.

Filter scopes simply refer to what is impacted by the filter, either just the visual, the whole report page, the entire report, or only when drilling into a visual’s information. A fundamental skill and practice in Power BI report development is utilizing the report filter scopes and the filter conditions available to each scope.

For example, a report intended for the European sales team can be filtered at the report level for the European sales territory group and specific report pages can be filtered for France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Reports can be further customized by implementing filter conditions to specific visuals, applying more complex filter conditions...

Bookmarks

Bookmarks enable report authors to save specific states of reports for easy access and sharing with others. For example, an important or common view of a report page that involves filter conditions across several columns can be saved as a bookmark for easy access at a later time via a command button, the bookmark navigator control, or the bookmark dropdown in the Power BI service.

By persisting the exact state of a report page, such as whether a visual is visible, bookmarks enable report authors to deliver application-like experiences for their users. For example, rather than expecting or asking users to navigate to separate report pages or to apply certain filters, bookmarks containing these different visuals and filter contexts could be readily available to the user.

By default, bookmarks represent the entire state of a report page, including all filter selections and the properties of the visuals (for example, hidden or not). However, bookmarks can also optionally...

Live connections to Power BI datasets

An optional but very important report planning and design decision is whether or not to develop the data model and report visuals within the same Power BI Desktop file or to separate the report from the dataset into separate files. As a general recommendation, if there’s any possibility that additional reports will be needed in the future based on the same dataset, the dataset and report should be separated into separate files and likely separate workspaces as well.

With Live connections to Power BI datasets, report authors can develop reports in Power BI Desktop files containing only the visualization layer (report pages of visuals) while leveraging a single, “golden” dataset. Increasingly organizations will isolate these source datasets, which are typically maintained by an IT or BI department, into Power BI workspaces that only the IT or BI organization has edit rights to. Report authors and users of these source datasets...

Report design summary

As a data visualization and analytics platform, Power BI provides a vast array of features and functionality for report authors to develop compelling content that helps users to derive insights.

Given the volume of features and possible formatting configurations, report authors and BI teams generally want to follow a set of report planning and design practices to ensure that report content of a consistent quality is delivered to stakeholders. These practices include report planning in terms of scope, users, and use cases, data visualization practices, and the selection of visuals.

The Report planning process, Visualization best practices, and Choosing the right visual sections earlier in this chapter provided details on many of the recommended practices to develop effective and sustainable report content. As a standard summary-level review of report creation, at the conclusion of a development phase and prior to deployment, the following list of questions...

Summary

In this chapter, we walked through the fundamental components of Power BI report planning and design, including visualization best practices, Live connections to Power BI datasets, and the filter scopes available in Power BI Desktop. We also reviewed the overall report planning process and introduced the report architecture diagram as a tool to aid in that planning.

The following chapter is also dedicated to report development, but goes well beyond the fundamental design concepts and features introduced in this chapter. The next chapter explores the basics of report authoring, including an exploration of the different visuals and formatting features available during report development.

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