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#Power BI Slicer – Slicer properties to make it look sleeker

by Prathy Kamasani
written by Prathy Kamasani

In my recent open data project, I created a single page report model with a sparse slicer. It’s a good trick for anyone who wants to make their slicer look a bit sleeker. Like any other visual in Power BI, Slicers also have many properties. By default, below is how slicer looks in Power BI, but I made few changes to make it look like the one on left, in a few steps.

Steps

  • Place the slicer on the report page
  • Go to Items in Properties, add a frame around items
  • Go to General in properties, update outline weight, I prefer anything more than 7 or 8
  •  Change Outline color to your visual background or Report Page background.

That’s all. Here is a video me explaining it – https://youtu.be/MYIW2_c4AAk

And a video of the full report design here – https://youtu.be/MYIW2_c4AAk?t=1

How I designed, Top 20 Drinks #PowerBI Model

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DesignPower BIQuick Tip

#PowerBI Buttons with animation

by Prathy Kamasani
written by Prathy Kamasani

The inspiration behind this post solely came from WHO website https://www.who.int/. I went onto to check some COVID data and found quick links on the main page quite interesting, hence this post. Using Buttons in Power BI is straight forward, and we see many Power BI report designers using it more often. What I observed, not everyone uses the amazing extra functionalities of Power BI Buttons. In this post, I want to use properties of Buttons, Shapes and try to achieve the look and feel I saw on the WHO website. The look I am going for is below:

 

Let’s see how we can create it in Power BI:

  1. Create a button, follow this article to create a button in Power BI Desktop – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/create-reports/desktop-buttons
  2. Add Text to Button. For the sake of the blog post, I am just going for Button 1, Button 2, etc.
  3. Add line shape and put it behind the Button, Send it back!
  4. Add Fill to All buttons same as the background colour of the page and no transparency.
  5. Select all buttons, change the fill transparency to 100 % on hover. Now your buttons will look something like below.
  6. Now change the text of each Button on Hover with a prefix of Empty Characters. Yes, empty characters!

https://emptycharacter.com/ is your friend when it comes to empty characters. From here copy an empty character and paste infant of your text in the Button. In this example, I pasted Empty Characters before Button Text on Hover. I went for three empty characters before each Button Text. That’s it, and you will have a subtle animated effect on your buttons.

I am sure someone out there must be thinking, why don’t we add a space before the text, I am sorry but that doesn’t work. Don’t know why! I am sure, Power BI doing something cleaver to not to show empty spaces before the text. Hope someone finds this post inspiring.
PBIX – https://1drv.ms/u/s!Avm7gbgZtlMlyhlTp2zkQxArZsOG?e=Fcd1Lm

Until next time,

Prathy 🙂

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DesignPower BI

#POWERBI REPORTS LANDING PAGE TIPS AND TRICKS: Progressive disclosure design approach in Power BI using Card pattern

by Prathy Kamasani
written by Prathy Kamasani

What is Progressive Disclosure?

Progressive disclosure is an interaction design pattern that sequences information and actions across several screens (e.g., a step-by-step signup flow). The purpose is to lower the chances that users will feel overwhelmed by what they encounter. By disclosing information progressively, interaction designers reveal only the essentials, and help users manage the complexity of feature-rich websites or applications.

https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/progressive-disclosure

When we hear UX terms like Progressive Disclosure, it feels like they are essential for Web design or App design. Well, they are vital for report and dashboard design, especially landing pages. In this post, let’s look at the Horizontal card pattern.

Using Horizontal Cards:

2020 04 29 16 58 15 1

In the above example, I used a pattern to show details using action from the Card. When a user clicks on a card, the report will show details related to Card. It sounds straightforward, but it involves a lot of work using Power BI Functionalities: Buttons, Bookmarks, Sections, Grouping and Page Size.

There are few aesthetics I paid attention in this Report Page which are key for any landing page. Usually, a Landing page helps users to navigate around the Power BI Model, so it is important to highlight those navigation steps. In the above model, I used Buttons, labels and Images for navigation hints.

Button:

I again used the Button Hover effect as I used in the previous post. Instead of using images, I used a very subtle hover over shadow kind of effect. To achieve this, I added an Outline to the Button with the following properties.

UntitledImage

Under Button, I added a shape with below properties.

UntitledImage

My shape size is slightly less than the button size. So when the user looks at it, Shape looks like a card; overplayed Button gives an action to show detail and also hover over effect to provide User Experience users.

Labels:

I added a text label with an image to hint users to click on cards.

UntitledImage

Images:

I added images to navigate back to the landing page. Also, to help users to highlight which detail window belongs to which category.

UntitledImage

Bars:

I also added lines under buttons to show which tab has been selected using shapes in Power BI.

UntitledImage

That’s all; I hope this inspires you to create some Power BI Awesomeness.

You can view Power BI report here – Link

Prathy 😊

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DataVizDesignPower BI

Power BI reports landing page tips and tricks: Tiles using, Images, Power BI buttons, hover effects and all the above 

by Prathy Kamasani
written by Prathy Kamasani

This is a blog post series to show various ways of creating parts of landing pages for better UX and navigation

Tiles using, Images, Power BI buttons, hover effects and all the above

Either it is Power BI report or some web page, tiles are one of the best-known ways to add the user experience to landing pages. When Tiles has images, dynamic content, actions, they get more practical plus engaging. Let’s look at some ways of creating tiles in Power BI

Approach 1

This is probably the most common approach. Import an image to Power BI Desktop, add an action to go to the bookmark, in this case, a detail page and add some text under the image. This text can be dynamic with DAX.

UntitledImage

Approach 2

We can extend the example by adding a button when the user hovers over the button, a text appears giving the context of the action or detail.

2020 04 22 22 44 27 1

This can be achieved by putting an empty button on top of the image. Then update the properties of button to show text only “On Hover”

Approach 3

In the above example text is static, but we can make it dynamic.

2020 04 22 22 53 29 1

This can be done by using the expression functionality of Button Text property of the button. That gives the functionality to show dynamic text.

Approach 4

Having images are likeable but too many are never right, that’s when instead of going for an image, we can just show Button with Text. But on hover over we can add more context, like below:

Here, I am just using a group of visuals and an image to show details. I added static text with a URL feel.

Approach 5

Another way is to show static or dynamic text in the button, but instead of showing over the image, actually show under the image as a description.

To achieve this result, we use same text properties as shown in the above approaches but instead of using top or middle vertical alignment, go for bottom vertical alignment. Also, make the blank button size bigger than the image size so the text shows right under the image on hover over.

More landing pages tips to follow, hoping these examples leaves you with some inspiration.

You can download the PBIX here and view here

Prathy 🙂

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DesignPower BI

#PowerBI Card visual to show flags/warnings

by Prathy Kamasani
written by Prathy Kamasani

This is a long-overdue blog post. A couple of months ago, I worked with a client in Amsterdam; one of the use cases was to show key metrics, flags that need attention. The user also wanted to click on warning symbol to confirm, where the issues were, however, the user didn’t want a drill through, it has to be a left-click.

As of yet, except for button/action we can not do left clicks in Power BI. As the user didn’t want the report to open in another browser tab etc., so was thinking about other options and at the end decided to go for tooltips and symbols to show flags like below:

Power BI Visual with warnings

#PowerBI Card visual to show banners/warnings:

Card visual is my go-to visual when it comes to Key metrics with numbers. In this use case, the user wanted to see key metrics, warnings and the respective details of warnings.

Two things I considered while designing this:

  1. Highlight only the values that needed attention
  2. Keep the design and clicks simple

When it comes to flags, many times, I see people highlighting all values. In my opinion highlighting should add the benefit; it should not make the report or visual cluttered. So I try to focus on data that needs attention. If we look at the below screenshots, we can see the difference very well.

However, in my use case, I want to highlight only some data, but that may not be in your case, and you may want to highlight all warnings.

Next, fewer clicks or no clicks. In this use case, I needed a dynamic, data-driven display of details. Tooltips are perfect for this use case, and the user doesn’t have to do much other than hovering over the warning sign.

Design:

So first I created a DAX measure to show the symbols I wanted to show, something like this:

Warning2 =

VAR V =IF([% Change]=BLANK(),BLANK(),
IF([% Change]>0.1,"Great",
IF([% Change]>0.03&&[% Change]<0.10,"Good",
IF([% Change]<0.03,"Bad"))))
Return

IF(V=“Good",”★",”")

Once I have my measure ready, I created one Card to show my measure value and the other one to show the warning, like below:

2019 10 21 14 37 34

Then I used conditional formatting to make the colour of the symbol based on my measure

2019 10 21 14 41 03

The user was pretty pleased with the approach since then I used this kind of design at various places so thought to write a blog post to, hoping it will inspire someone out there. Key metrics are very important in the report design, keep an eye on my next blog post where I will be writing my approaches about “Visualising Key Metrics using Power BI”.

You can view the report here.

Prathy

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DesignQuick Tip

#PowerBI Focus Mode and Dark Background Images

by Prathy Kamasani
written by Prathy Kamasani

A quick post today. I received an interesting question in a webinar I did recently for “Best of Power BI World Series”.  During the webinar, someone asked me “How to deal with a Table or a Matrix visual, when you have a dark background image, light font colour in Focus Mode?”.

So what exactly he/she meant?

As you see in the below video, when I go in focus mode, I can not see any values because my font colour and the background colour of Focus mode are white.

To overcome this, especially when you are using dark backgrounds, it is better to use the same colour as background as your visual background too, like below. That way when you go on focus mode, you will still see the font. I will be talking more about visual backgrounds in my next post, so stay tuned.

Whenever I work with font colours, I find ColorCombos website very useful. It has a Font Colour Test option, which comes very handy to choose right foreground and background colours.  –https://www.colorcombos.com/color-schemes/27/ColorCombo27.html

Keep smiling,

Prathy 🙂

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DAXDesignPower BI

Dynamic Legend in #Power BI Visual, Line Chart

by Prathy Kamasani
written by Prathy Kamasani

It has been a while since I written a blog post, even my ten years old daughter started teasing saying “Motionless blog”, so decided to get back to blogging with a short and simple blog post based on a question I received about one of my Power BI portfolio report Global Landslides Data. Few people asked me how I created the slicer in this report,

So how I created the Dynamic Legend in Power BI Visual, Line Chart :

I was using slicer as a button to dynamically choose the legend I wanted to show in the line Chart. In fact, it was relatively straightforward:

First I created an aggregated table like below

Table =
UNION(
//Incidents
SUMMARIZE('Global Landslide Data'
,'Global Landslide Data'[ID]
,'Global Landslide Data'[Date]
,"Slicer","Incidents"
,"Incidents",'Global Landslide Data'[Incidents]
,"Distance",BLANK()
,"Injuries",BLANK()
,"Fatalities",BLANK()
)
,//Distance

SUMMARIZE('Global Landslide Data'
,'Global Landslide Data'[ID]
,'Global Landslide Data'[Date]
,"Slicer","Distance"
,"Incidents",BLANK()
,"Distance",CALCULATE(SUM('Global Landslide Data'[Distance]))
,"Injuries",BLANK()
,"Fatalities",BLANK()
)
,//Injuries

SUMMARIZE('Global Landslide Data'
,'Global Landslide Data'[ID]
,'Global Landslide Data'[Date]
,"Slicer","Injuries"
,"Incidents",BLANK()
,"Distance",BLANK()
,"Injuries",CALCULATE(SUM('Global Landslide Data'[Injuries]))
,"Fatalities",BLANK()
)
,//Fatalities

SUMMARIZE('Global Landslide Data'
,'Global Landslide Data'[ID]
,'Global Landslide Data'[Date]
,"Slicer","Fatalities"
,"Incidents",BLANK()
,"Distance",BLANK()
,"Injuries",BLANK()
,"Fatalities",CALCULATE(SUM('Global Landslide Data'[Fatalities]))
)
)

The logic is to create a table with the DAX function UNION. Each Table expression in UNION function represents a value of slicer. Apart from that slicer related value, all the rest of the values are blanks.  It is key to have them as blanks than zero’s, we don’t see any data.

Then I chose the slicer column as the value in my Slicer visual and allowed slicer to have multiple selections. Then in the visual, I have used all measures as values, so based on the slicer selection it shows the trend line.

You can see it in the report here – https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiN2I4YWI4MjMtYmIyYy00ZjRkLWFjYTktZjM1ZjIwODk0ZjkzIiwidCI6IjM4YmU3MjU5LTMyMGQtNDZkYy04YzNiLWNkZDA5OTM1NGExMyIsImMiOjh9

Till next time,

Prathy 🙂

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ADDING A VERTICAL LINE OR MARKER TO A CHART IN POWER BI
DesignPower BI

Adding a vertical line or marker to a chart in Power BI

by Prathy Kamasani
written by Prathy Kamasani

A business user came to me asking “how can I get a vertical line on Line Chart in Power BI like my Excel report?”. I was like, “It’s straightforward. We have this analytics pane which lets you add so many types of lines 😊 “. But, quite quickly I understood, I cannot draw a vertical line as we do in Excel or SSRS.

Adding a vertical line or marker to a chart in Power BI

Data looks like below:

The user wants a marker, ideally a line to point those events on the chart. I cannot think of an out the box option, but there are some workarounds. Let’s look at adding a line using Combo Chart. This chart clearly shows events as bars and tooltips can define what kind of event it was. I would prefer to change the bar width. It’s a bar; it’s not exactly a line; however, it fits for the purpose.

 

Next using Markers:

With latest Power BI update, we can set line stroke width to zero. So I decided to use that feature to highlight the events on the chart. It’s a simple Line Chart with one axis and two values. One value is to show the Value column and other to show Count of Event. My chart looks like this:

Then I updated X Axis type to Categorical (Otherwise, Markers functionality will not be available). Then under Shapes, set Show marker to On, followed by Customize series option to On. Then I turned off marker for Value column, On for Count of Event.

Then I decreased Stoke width to 0 and increased Marker size to 16. Now the chart looks like this:

Tooltip don’t make much sense, but by using new report tool tip pages functionality we can have much more helpful and user-friendly tooltip like below:

Hope this post helps someone out there
Prathy 🙂
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