2016 1 20 Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Power BI MOD3 9a
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We've already seen some of the formatting options
that Power BI gives you to control the look and feel
of your charts and visuals in your reports.
One of the most common things that people want to change
is the colors. Let's take a look at how we can do that
and also some of the other formatting options that we have
on basic bar charts and column charts.
I've got a really simple chart here just showing unit revenue
sorry, unit sales by category. And I'm going to make
some of the changes here to format this in different ways.
So when I select the visual, you'll see in the visualizations pane
this format paint brush. And this gives you
all of the different options that you have for changing
these different chart types. So one of the basic ones
I'm going to start with is just the colors.
You have a default color that allows you to pick
from a whole range to change all of the bars in this chart.
So if I want to make them a nice pink color, I can do that.
I can also go in and say, "Actually I want to change each bar
individually." So for example if you've got particular colors
that you use in your business to represent different categories,
then you can set those individually.
The other thing you might want to do is actually use
a particular value to change the color. So rather than changing
the color by these categorical values, you want to use
a measure to do that. And back on the field, you'll see
there's a color saturation bucket. So if I drop something
like the sales variate percentage into here,
you can see now that the color of each one of these is driven
by that sales variate percent. So we can see the rural category
has got the highest variance and the lowest ones, the mixed category,
has got the lightest color. I can also change
the scale and the different colors that are used here.
So if I wanted to go from kind of a red to a green color,
I can do that and you'll see now that the color scale has changed.
I can change to a diverging scale so that it goes through
a different color in the middle, so three white in the middle.
And I can specify the actual numbers that I want to use
as the minimum and maximum. So for one of these diverging ones,
I might want to use zero as my center point.
Although actually I think all of the numbers here are negative,
which is why everything's showing up as red.
It gives me a whole range of different ways of doing this,
and it would mean that I could actually use this to set
kind of a rule where anything over a certain amount is one color.
Anything under a certain amount is a different color.
Let's set this back to the defaults and take a look
at some of the other options. Something else I can add in
here is a reference line.
If I turn that on, you'll see by default the value is zero.
So we get a line right across the bottom of the chart.
And I can come in and change this as well. So let's make it a million
maybe this is the target for our unit sales.
And again, I can do things like changing the color for this
or adding a label to it, as well.
See how it appears just over on the left-hand side here.
Finally one of the other things that you might use
I've seen people do this across particularly reports
that have got multiple visuals in them
is actually adding a border to each visual.
You can just put a simple line border around it
and change things like the colors. It just helps to identify
different areas in your report on a visual basis.
So that's just a quick example of some of the formatting options
that you have to control things on these individual charts.