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 a really good one if you're building dashboards 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 array 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 it at 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 by just setting in a particular, a 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 zeroes. There we go. And now you can see how 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 there, just over the halfway mark. So that's one thing, that's gauges. The other thing we can do is use a card visualization which actually just shows us the numeric representation as 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 to see, you know, ignore that, just give me the exact value 5.199 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 I want to put into this card. So let's create a new one... And I'll call this measure our Progress. I'll start off by putting in some text there, so "Progress on unit sales this year." And I'll just need to concatenate this with the measure that I'm interested in. I'm actually going to use our units column, so I want to sum that one up. So 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. That way we see everything. And I still get updated and sliced and diced along with everything else in visualization... In our report rather. And you can use this in some really clever ways. And if you wanted to get a bit more involved in writing some more complex tax... You might have ones with if statements in there that say, "If I've only got a single year selected then it's just this year's sales, if I've got all the years selected," then maybe the text says something different like "total sales over all years." 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 could 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 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 can also drop a target in here, and the great thing about using this target is it will 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, so high sales or higher unit sales is better but if you had maybe... You know, some cost of goods sold metric, usually lower is better for that. And you can also control things like the way that the number itself is displayed, the 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.