Locked lesson.
About this lesson
This lesson covers an introduction to create different visuals and cross filtering in Power BI.
Exercise files
Download this lesson’s related exercise files. You can download the source data files for the course from the resources section of your Lessons page.
Creating visuals.pbix346.8 KB Creating visuals - Completed.pbix
348.4 KB
Quick reference
Creating visuals
Creating visuals in Power BI.
When to use
Use when you want to create new visuals in Power BI Desktop.
Instructions
Creating a new visual is done via the following method:
- Click the canvas first to ensure you don’t have an existing visual selected
- Click one of the visuals in the Visualizations gallery
- Drag a field from the Fields list and drop it in the Visualization field area
- Change aggregation by clicking the drop-down arrow on the field
Hints & tips
- Make sure you click the canvas before creating a new visual, or you may just change an existing one!
- 00:04 Now normally the second step in the process would be to go and relate tables.
- 00:10 We dont' really have tables to relate here because we've only got a single table.
- 00:13 So we'll skip that for now.
- 00:15 The third step would be to go and create measures, but for
- 00:18 right now we're gonna use implicit measures.
- 00:20 And we'll get into dealing with explicit measures a little bit later on
- 00:23 in the course.
- 00:25 So the fourth step now is to create some visuals.
- 00:28 Again, you'll notice that our data is already prepped and loaded, so
- 00:31 we can go back into our report canvas to create our visuals.
- 00:35 You'll notice that on the right hand side, we have a fields list that shows every
- 00:38 field that came from our original data table.
- 00:41 And we have this visualizations gallery.
- 00:44 What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click on the first visual that I like,
- 00:47 a clustered column chart.
- 00:48 And that's gonna put a nice little frame here
- 00:51 which gives me a list of different fields that I can actually use.
- 00:55 So what I'm going to do with this one is I'm going to go and say, you know what,
- 00:58 let's go and put category and drag it and drop it into the axis area.
- 01:03 And it changes the visual a little bit, it doesn't really do a whole heck of a lot.
- 01:07 Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to come across and I'm going to say,
- 01:09 you know what, let's take the total sale.
- 01:11 And I'm just going to check the box next to it and see what happens.
- 01:14 Look, it adds it to the values are immediately and
- 01:17 it gives me a nice little chart that I can resize, so that I can see what's going on.
- 01:22 You'll notice that the y-axis here is automatically calculated.
- 01:26 Which is just fine, thanks very much.
- 01:28 And we have a nice little chart that shows us the sales, by category.
- 01:33 I'd like to add another visual as well.
- 01:34 I'm just gonna put this down a little bit here.
- 01:36 I'm gonna add another visual.
- 01:38 We're gonna go with a clustered, let's try a clustered bar chart this time.
- 01:42 So we'll grab one of those and maybe I wanna put it up over in this area here.
- 01:47 This time I'm going to build my sales by location name.
- 01:50 So I'm gonna grab the Location Name, I'll check the box.
- 01:53 It immediately goes into access.
- 01:55 And I'm gonna check Total Sale and
- 01:57 you'll notice that we've got something that looks quite nice here as well.
- 02:01 It even gives me a nice little title that says total sales by location name.
- 02:05 Maybe I don't want this called location name here.
- 02:07 I could right click and I could say you know what let's rename this to Location.
- 02:14 And even thought it doesn't rename the field name here, it does in the title.
- 02:20 So that's kind of neat.
- 02:21 Let's see what else can I tell about this data.
- 02:23 I know, let's grab a card.
- 02:25 This little thing with the one two three on it and I'm going to go and
- 02:30 throw on the date.
- 02:31 And you'll notice that it comes back and it says,
- 02:34 the earliest data is Friday, January 2nd, 2015.
- 02:37 So that tells me something interesting, but if I'm building this dashboard,
- 02:41 I'm really more interested in what the last date is in this particular area.
- 02:44 So if I select my card, I can actually go over to where it says Earliest Date and
- 02:48 I can click this little drop down arrow, and I can say, don't give me earliest,
- 02:52 give me latest.
- 02:53 Or, I could ask for a distinct count of dates, or a count.
- 02:55 But in this case we're gonna go with the latest date.
- 02:57 And that tells me that my sales only run to December 3, 2016.
- 03:02 So that's kind of an interesting thing to know.
- 03:05 How much is the total sales?
- 03:07 Well, I'm gonna go click, and again, this time I'm just gonna point out here,
- 03:10 I'm clicking in the canvas to make sure the visual is not selected.
- 03:14 Because if I don't, let's try this one here.
- 03:17 And I'm gonna change it to a card.
- 03:20 And it breaks it.
- 03:21 It gives me a 5.24, which actually is really what I want, but
- 03:25 it got rid of my old chart.
- 03:26 So I'm just gonna press Ctrl+Z to undo that and get my chart back.
- 03:29 That's what happens if you choose a new visual type when you're on
- 03:32 an existing one.
- 03:33 So let's go click over here for a second.
- 03:35 Now, we'll click on a card again.
- 03:37 And I'll grab total sale.
- 03:39 There we go, so total sales are 5.24 million.
- 03:42 And maybe we'll grab one more card here and say unit sold and
- 03:47 we can see that we sold 1 million individual sales unit as well.
- 03:51 So here we go, we've got a few different visuals on here that
- 03:54 allow us to very quickly go, and slice and dice, and drop different things on here.
- 03:59 What else do we wanna know about this?
- 04:01 Well, I wanna show you how these things work because this is really, really cool.
- 04:07 Let's go click on Wine for a second.
- 04:11 And notice that everything cross-filters.
- 04:13 The last sale was December 3rd, we only sold $1.4 million of wine,
- 04:18 and 230,000 units.
- 04:20 And you can see, across our three locations,
- 04:22 where these individual items were sold.
- 04:24 If I go and click on draft beer we can see that we have got $1.4 million,
- 04:28 if we click on that, indeed, that is what ends up showing up here.
- 04:31 Right click on draft beer again, it unfilters all these visuals, so
- 04:34 now we have an interactive and engaging visual canvas.
- 04:38 There is one more thing that is really important to any report though, and
- 04:41 that is giving your report a good title.
- 04:44 So, to do that, we use a text box.
- 04:46 So, I'm gonna click on Text box, and you'll notice that it actually gives me
- 04:49 a little text box here that I can play around with.
- 04:52 The data set that I'm working with is for
- 04:54 a fictitious restaurant chain called The Loaded Pencil.
- 04:57 So, what we're gonna do is we're gonna say this is gonna be The Loaded,
- 05:03 let's try and capitalize that correctly, The Loaded Pencil Sales report.
- 05:11 We'll just call it something like that.
- 05:12 And we can resize this.
- 05:15 And we can change the font size and
- 05:16 things like this in here if we don't wanna use, whoop.
- 05:19 We don't want to use the Segoe UI 14.
- 05:22 I want to change this up to a 32 points and make it nice and bold.
- 05:27 And then I could go and slide this guy across the top of my visual piece here, so
- 05:32 I could give something nice like this.
- 05:34 If I wanted to insert an image, I would need something saved on my desktop
- 05:38 that I could then click Image and actually bring that in as well.
- 05:41 But at this point I've got a new little report that I've built up,
- 05:44 it was very easy drag and drop.
- 05:46 Very similar to a pivot table and it cross filters quite nicely by going and
- 05:49 clicking on the individual items.
- 05:51 If you click on Ethical Development and see how much is sold on that location or
- 05:54 in tax evader.
- 05:55 And if I click again on one of those bars, it will unfilter everything
- 05:59 to give me a nice, engaging, interactive canvas to work with.
Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.