Introduction
Without the right visuals, your Power BI report is redundant. To showcase powerful insights you need to understand when and how to use different visuals so that you can avoid wasting valuable time on building reports that don’t make an impact.
We’ll walk through the process we use to decide which visuals to use to showcase different insights, allowing you to correctly apply and design visuals in your reports so that you are implementing best practices and driving clear insights.
What are Power BI Visuals
Visuals are simply a visual (picture) representation of your data and are the most important part of any Power BI report as they are responsible for bringing your data to life.
Visuals help you to tell a better data story, enabling your users to simply and easily identify and understand the patterns in your data.
Types of Power BI Visuals
There are many ways to show your data through visualization.
When choosing your visual you need to consider what type of information your insight is looking to show.
The type of visual you chose to depict your data will depend on: the data you wish to communicate and what you want to say about that data.
Most visuals can be divided into the following 6 categories.
1. Comparison
Comparison visuals compare data between different categories.
Use Case: Income across fiscal years.
2. Data Over Time
Data over time visuals represent the spread of data over a period of time and are displayed to identify trends or changes.
Use Case: Sales performance over time.
3. Correlation
Correlation visuals are used to find whether there is a relationship between two or more variables.
Use Case: Price and demand.
4. Distribution
Distribution visuals are used to show how often values occur in a dataset.
Use Case: Distribution of orders
5. Part-to-Whole
Part-to-whole visuals show the breakdown of elements that add up to a whole.
Use Case: Profit by product segment.
6. Ranking
Ranking visuals showcase an ordered list based on a unique data point and are used when the position of the element is more important than its relative value.
Use Case: Leads by sales stage
Positioning of Visuals
Where you position your visuals in your report is critical.
A consistent layout and grouping of relevant metrics together will help your audience understand and absorb the data quickly. The correct layout ensures your dashboard is easy to understand and has a logical flow between different insights, which is important as users tend to process information from top to bottom.
Grouping relevant metrics together, such as KPIs, adds further to the logical report flow and the ease of user insight interpretation.
Top
The top of a dashboard should include high-level insights represented as visuals such as KPIs or Gauges.
The middle of a dashboard should represent trend-based data including activity-based metrics, and visuals that demonstrate data over time. This section is best suited for larger visuals.
Bottom
The bottom of a dashboard is reserved for granular metrics such as specific KPIs, or Tables.
Sizing of Visuals
The sizing of your visuals will depend on the level of detail you want them to display.
The greater the detail that your insight presents, the larger you want your visual to be so that users can distinguish the finer details.
For example, when visualizing an insight that compares multiple data categories, you would opt to have a larger visual in comparison to an insight which is visualizing a singular number.
Standard Power BI Visuals
Power BI has numerous options for how you can visualize your data.
Follow my below blogs for information on visuals. Thank you for reading.
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