Hello, I hope everyone is having a great day today. In today’s blog I am going to explain what some of the different visualizations are and what they can do. Now I am aware that Power BI was recently updated, so your report page layout may look different than mine, but the visualizations are all the same. Without further ado, let’s get into the next blog in my series: How to Add Visualizations to Your Power BI Report!
To follow along with me click here.
Power BI has many different visualization options ranging from simple charts like bar charts and pie charts to more complicated ones like treemaps or decomposition trees, all of which we will discuss in due time. To start off we are going to look at how you can add visuals to your report page. In Figure 1 below, you can see the drop-down menu that allows you to see all of the visuals that Power BI has to offer. All you need to do to get the visualization you want now is simply select the option which suits your reporting needs best.
There is also another way that you can add visualizations into your report page. For this method you must open up the data pane (highlighted in red in Figure 2).
After clicking the data pane (highlighted in red in Figure 2 above), the data pane will open up, showing all of the tables in the data set (highlighted in red in Figure 3).
From here what you will need to do is click on the drop-down arrow for one of these tables which will then show you all of the different columns that are inside of the tables (highlighted in red in Figure 4).
Finally, you will need to either click on one of the columns or drag it over to the “report canvas.” If you click, the visualization will be automatically placed in the top-left corner of the canvas. However, if you drag the column onto the canvas, the visualization will appear wherever you release the mouse.
Subsequently, when you bring the column over into the canvas, Power BI will automatically try to find the visualization that would suit your selected data the best. In my case, Power BI chose a Card Visual highlighted in red in Figure 5. You might also see that there is a slider button that says “Suggest a type” next to it (highlighted in green in Figure 5). This makes Power BI continue its automatic data detection and will change what type of visual you have based on the other data you enter into the “+Add data” slot (highlighted in blue in Figure 5).
When I add the ‘OrderDate‘ column, the Card automatically transforms into a Line Chart, as shown in Figure 6 below.
Now, with the “Suggest a type” button, this doesn’t mean that you can’t change it to whatever visualization you want. If you click the drop-down arrow next to the visual types (highlighted in red in Figure 7), it will then show all of the different visualizations that you can choose.
In Figure 8, you can see that I selected the Clustered Bar Chart Visual and Power BI changes the format of the data to fit this chart style better but also turns off the “Suggest a type” button since you are choosing a data type not originally recommended by Power BI (highlighted in green in Figure 8).
The last way to add visualizations to your canvas, which I will cover in this blog, is nearly identical to the first method, with the only difference being that you initiate it from the Insert ribbon (highlighted in red in Figure 9).From here you can see that there is yet another drop-down menu for all of the visualizations (highlighted in green in Figure 9).
After clicking the drop-down menu (highlighted in green in Figure 9 above), all you need to do is click on the visualization you want to add to the report page and to fill it in with data.
That will be it for today’s blog. I truly appreciate everyone who has taken the time to read through it, and I welcome any feedback on how I can make improvements. Next blog in this series will be on using DAX to create measures. In the meantime, have a great day!
For the finished file from today’s blog click here.
Bailey McDonald
Data Engineer, Patriot Consulting
Email: bkmcdonald@patriotconsultingcorp.com | Blogs: Patriot Consulting Blogs
LinkedIn: Personal: BaileyMcDonald | Company: Patriot Consulting
