2016 1 20 Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Power BI MOD3 9a

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.