Lab-3-9

>> The visualizations we've looked at so far have typically been used to compare values across different categories or to compare two different values. But if you're building reports in Power BI, sometimes you want them to just show a single KPI or a single metric just so that you can track that as it changes over time. We have a few different visuals that help do that. Gauges are really good one if you're building bashboards and want to show progress towards a particular target. Let's look at our total revenue. And you can see that our gauge shows the overall number, in this case 5.2 billion and then progress towards a certain amount. By default this end amount is just double whatever the value was. So you'll always see about halfway point. You can add other fields on the right hand side here to determine the minimum, maximum, or the target either bound to particular data values. Or you can use the formatting options to go and customize these budget setting in a particular specific value. So if I wanted our maximum to be 10 billion, keep going till I hit 10 billion. I could also choose what my target is. So I want to have my target at seven billion. Make sure I get enough zeros. Here we go. And now you can see our gauge has got a little target line that shows us this is what our target is, seven billion and we know that we're tracking towards potentially a total of 10 billion. Just over, just of the halfway mark. So that's one thing, that's gauges. The other thing that we can do is use a card visualization which actually just shows us the numeric representation as some text. By default we'll use display units to try and trim down the number rather than having something with lots and lots of digits in it. But I can also use the formatting options to go and override this. So rather than choosing this automatic display units I can say, actually, I want to see it in thousands or even I want say, you know, ignore that, just give me the exact value 5.19 billion. I can change the precision if I want to add more or less decimal places. And I've got a few different options about turning the label on and off, or even doing word-wrap if I've got a particularly long value here. And on that subject, there are some clever things that you can do with these cards. I can actually create a measure in my model that returns a string, returns some text that I want to put into this card. So let's create a new one. And I'll call this measure, how about Progress? And I'll start off by putting some text to it. So progress on unit sales this year. And I'll just need to concatenate this with the measure that I'm interested in. I am actually going to use our units column. So I want to sum that one up. So the total sum over our units column. And I can see here's my progress. Okay, so let's drag this on to our canvas. And I want to visualize this one as a card as well. So now I get some text saying what the progress on our unit sales is. Drag this one out. Oh, it was here I think. And this will get updated and sliced and diced along with everything else in our visualization, in our report rather. And you can use this in some really clever ways. I mean, if you want to get in, bit more involve in writing some more complex tax, you might have ones with If statements in there that say, you know, if I've only got a single year selected, then it's just this year's sales, if I've got all years selected, then maybe the text says something different like, total sales over all years. And you can do some really clever things by using this. Have a look online, there's lots of examples of how people have used this already as well. All of the single number visuals tend to lend themselves to showing KPIs where you've got a particular value and a target you're working towards. We actually have a KPI visual as well that can be really useful for showing this sort of information. The great thing about this KPI visual is it shows you an indicator, an actual number but also a trend over the last few time periods of how that, that number has changed. So let's take a look at our units amount over the last few years. And you can see in the background we get this nice trend line. So we had a big peak a few years ago, things have dropped off in the last couple of years. I could also drop a target in here. And the great thing about using this target is it'll actually color the KPI based on your progress towards it. So if you haven't hit your goal yet, it's red. If you've gone over the goal, it's green. And you can control those goals, whether the goals are shown, you can control things like whether the Trend Axis is turned on or off. You can change whether higher is better or lower is better. So typically for sales and units, you know, higher sales or higher unit sales is better. But if you had maybe a, you know, some cost of goods sold metric, obviously lower is better for that. And you can also control things like the way that the number itself is displayed, to size of the text, that sort of stuff. There's plenty different formatting options in here as well. So all of those different types of visuals, the gauges, the cards, and these KPIs are really useful for showing single values and your progress towards them versus some sort of target for a particular time period.