Tag Archives: dataviz

Power BI Tip: Use a Scatter Chart to Create a Calendar Report

Power BI Desktop Scatter Chart

The Scatter Chart in Power BI and Excel is very useful chart for visualizing three different metrics in tandem. But with a little bit of work you can use a Scatter Chart to create a Calendar chart for visualizing your metrics across the days of an individual month.

New to Power BI Desktop? Start here!

To configure a Scatter Chart too mimic a Calendar type report, you need the following: Continue reading Power BI Tip: Use a Scatter Chart to Create a Calendar Report

Here’s the New #Excel 2016 Chart Types!

The Office 2016 Public Preview is now available for download! Included in the preview of Excel 2016 are a handful of new chart types and since I’m a huge fan of awesome data visualizations, I thought I’d take a few moments to play around with them and share my experience with you so you can have a better idea of what to expect in the next version of Excel. But to be honest, if you’re a data & visualizations nerd like me, you’re probably pretty excited! Continue reading Here’s the New #Excel 2016 Chart Types!

Twitter Analysis with #PowerBI & Plus One

Earlier this week Christopher Finlan put together this awesome Datazen dashboard using Plus One. Christopher has been doing a lot of cool things with Datazen so I recommend that you do like I did and subscribe to his blog. But Christopher’s cool work with Plus One inspired me to create my own Social Media dashboard using Plus One, as well.

powerbi search completePlus One has created this nifty little desktop application that you can download and install on your computer. Once you’ve set the app up, all you need to do is enter a search query. In my case, I wanted to see what people were doing and saying with Power BI on Twitter. Plus One can only recover the previous seven days of data, so you’ll need to periodically refresh your search or schedule the search, which you can do easily with the Plus One application. Continue reading Twitter Analysis with #PowerBI & Plus One

#PowerBI Tip: Use the Treemap, Column or Funnel Chart as a Colorful Slicer

Power BI Desktop has been out for GA for over a week now and some of the pro’s out there have come up with some pretty cool tricks. For instance:

But if you’re looking for a way to spice up you report filtering with a little color, try using the Treemap, Column or Funnel chart as a Slicer for those fields that only contain a few unique values. At this point with Power BI, you don’t have any customization options for the Slicer visualization (although I’m sure that is coming down the pipe in a future release). This option won’t work terribly well if the field you would like to use as a slicer has more than a dozen or so unique members, but you can experiment with it and see what you can come up with. Here’s my custom slicers in action.

column chart as slicer

tree map slice in action

Power BI Funnel slicer in action

To multi-select tiles in the custom slicer, just hold Cntrl as you click.

This little trick relies on the natural cross filtering between data regions in the Power BI dashboards. First I created a measure that calculates the distinct count of the field that I wish to use as my slicer. In this case the field is Genre.

Power BI Distinct Count DAX calculation

Then I added a Treemap/Funnel chart to the report using the field Genre as the Group value and the measure Distinct Count Genre as the Values.

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Then just resize the visualization so that the squares are about evenly sized. There’s a few ways you can arrange it, but just play around with it and see what you can come up with.

Power BI Dashboard with Treemap Slicer

Power BI Dashboard with Treemap Slicer

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Funnel slicer

If you are wondering how I made the column chart slicer, here’s a gif image that shows the steps I used. Enjoy!

Power BI column chart as slicer making of

Feedback?

What do you think? Leave me a comment below and let me know. Or if you’ve got a neat Power BI trick you’d like to share, let me know, as well. I love to hear new ideas! Thanks for reading!