Global Visual Concepts

Quick reference

• 00:05 We're now at probably the most fun part of the Power BI journey, and
• 00:08 that's where we get to create the visuals.
• 00:10 Before we get into looking at individual types of visuals though,
• 00:14 what I'd like to do is focus on some of the things that are common to all visuals,
• 00:18 the tools that work across the entire Power BI visualization stack.
• 00:22 We're gonna start by looking down at this little chart right here.
• 00:26 I'm just gonna select it.
• 00:27 I'm gonna draw your attention to this little square with the arrow.
• 00:30 This launches what we call focus mode.
• 00:32 So if the visual's really small,
• 00:34 you can now have a full size version of the visual.
• 00:38 I can mouse over it and get my tool tips.
• 00:40 I can click on something and you'll notice that it actually cross-filters.
• 00:44 And when I'm done, I can go and click the Back to Report button.
• 00:47 And you'll notice that the filters stick.
• 00:49 So if you have lots of small visuals,
• 00:51 this is a great way to be able to get a little bit more control over them.
• 00:55 And when I'm done, I can, of course, unfilter things.
• 00:58 Next to the focus mode menu is this more options dot dot dot button.
• 01:03 And when you click on that, you'll notice that you have a few options.
• 01:06 We have Export data, you could export the data points to a CSV.
• 01:09 Again, these are the summarize data points,
• 01:11 much like what we see when we click the See Data button.
• 01:15 If we were using implicit measures, we would see something that says,
• 01:19 See Records, but you wouldn't get the ability to export those records.
• 01:23 Now we also have three things here allowing us to sort by different things.
• 01:27 So I could click on Sort by Sales, and
• 01:29 what it would do is it would actually resort the visual so
• 01:32 that the largest sales numbers are on the left, cascading down.
• 01:36 I could go back and say, Sort by Budget, or say, Sort by Location.
• 01:41 And if I want to turn this sorting off and set it back to default,
• 01:45 I click the menu again and say, let's not sort by location name anymore.
• 01:50 The next item to look at is the paint roller icon.
• 01:53 If I go and select that,
• 01:54 you'll notice that this gives me lots of different formatting options.
• 01:58 Now there's lots of options in here.
• 01:59 And some of them make sense for certain charts and
• 02:01 some of them aren't there for others.
• 02:03 We're gonna look at a lot of these,
• 02:04 where they make sense in more detail as we go through the next few modules.
• 02:07 But for right now, let's just go and change, say, the data colors.
• 02:10 Maybe I don't like my budget in this dark green, so
• 02:13 I'll change it to a nice dark yellow.
• 02:15 And now I can actually have these two things open up quite nicely.
• 02:18 I could do the same thing to the next chart over here,
• 02:21 just to make sure that the theming is consistent and it looks pretty decent.
• 02:25 Again, it still cross-filters, but
• 02:27 it gives me a little bit more personalized flair for my data.
• 02:31 Next up, we'll talk about drill-down.
• 02:34 Now, this is something that happened to us automatically when we
• 02:38 added dates into the chart where we're building our quick measures,
• 02:42 we got this thing called the date hierarchy.
• 02:44 Now, we can change this, of course, by changing this to just show date.
• 02:47 But that's not really gonna work perfectly for our measure, so
• 02:50 we don't really want to do that.
• 02:51 But what happens when this works is that Power BI
• 02:54 adds an individual hierarchy for us.
• 02:56 Now I may not want things at, say, the day level, I can delete that so
• 02:59 we'd never see that.
• 03:01 I may not even want quarter level, I can get rid of that.
• 03:03 Now this will change the chart a little bit, now shows year and month.
• 03:07 But why is this important to us, what does it do?
• 03:09 Well, it comes up with these buttons that are listed across the top here now.
• 03:13 And I'm gonna go to the Visual Tools tab with data drill, and
• 03:16 I'm gonna show you that these buttons are here as well.
• 03:19 Let me just go back up for a level.
• 03:22 The first thing that happens is it's rendering our visual,
• 03:25 using the year field from the automatically created hierarchy.
• 03:29 Now, you can see that we have a button that says, Show Next Level.
• 03:33 What this will do is, and it's the same one that is showing on the chart.
• 03:36 When we click this, this will show the next level in the hierarchy.
• 03:39 So what this means is that it ignores the context of year, and
• 03:42 it aggregates all of the Januaries together, all of the Februaries together,
• 03:46 all of the Marches together.
• 03:48 And that's what you're seeing here is the aggregation of multiple years, segregated
• 03:52 down by months, but your year-to-date is showing you what the total aggregation is.
• 03:56 So it's a little bit odd when you're working with dates.
• 03:58 You probably don't want to roll up multiple years in there, unless you're
• 04:01 trying to figure out what's the general pattern for, say, June, July, or August.
• 04:06 If we click the little up arrow here, this will drill back up to the top level.
• 04:10 The next icon over is where we expand to the next level.
• 04:13 Now, this goes down one level in the hierarchy,
• 04:15 keeping that first column in context.
• 04:18 So now we have the year and month showing for each individual components, this makes
• 04:23 a little bit more sense as we're trying to drill in in this particular context.
• 04:27 Let me drill back up one more.
• 04:30 What if I wanna see just 2016?
• 04:32 Well, I can do that too.
• 04:34 I can actually activate Drill Down Mode by clicking on this button.
• 04:37 This means it's active when it's gray.
• 04:39 I can now drill into a specific data point and it will take me into just that year.
• 04:45 Now, the one thing that's unfortunate about Drill Down Mode is it doesn't
• 04:47 turn off when you're in the bottom level of the hierarchy.
• 04:49 So, if I want to go and cross-filter something now, I need to turn it off and
• 04:53 then I can click the visual, otherwise, it doesn't let me.
• 04:56 When I'm done, I can arrow back up.
• 04:59 Now, this visual is not just specific to hierarchies either.
• 05:03 We can actually go and create a new chart.
• 05:05 I could say, put category on it and my sales item.
• 05:08 And maybe I'll add the item name as well.
• 05:11 So now you'll see that I have my hierarchy showing up here.
• 05:15 If I were to go and drill down, I can say, you know what?
• 05:17 Show me my draft beer sales and it will drill in.
• 05:20 Or I could then, of course, go and say,
• 05:22 sort this by the sales dollars to put the largest ones at the top.
• 05:25 Pint of 1516 Lager is the biggest seller.
• 05:28 So now I can jump back up, and I can see that wine is the largest category.
• 05:32 And I can drill into it, and I can play around with these individual components.
• 05:35 So drill-down and hierarchies are really, really useful for
• 05:39 working with your data in a larger scale.
• 05:42 The final thing that I wanna show you is how to control visual interactions.
• 05:46 Because sometimes,
• 05:47 when you click on something, you don't want it to cross-filter everything else.
• 05:51 So in this case here, if I click on 2016, you can see that it cross-filters
• 05:55 everything and it dulls out this particular piece of the chart here.
• 05:58 Now, is that okay?
• 06:00 Maybe, but if I want to see something different, can I?
• 06:02 Absolutely, if we go up to the Visual Tools format menu and
• 06:07 we click on Edit Interaction,
• 06:08 you'll see that we get some icons that pop up on top of our visuals.
• 06:12 They're not all the same, but mostly.
• 06:15 You'll notice here that when I look at this particular chart, it's highlighted
• 06:17 this thing on the pie chart, which is actually called the highlight.
• 06:21 But there's some different options.
• 06:23 I can choose to have none, and this will actually not apply the filter.
• 06:28 So no matter what I do over here, it's not changing this filter at all,
• 06:32 although you can see that the chart on the left, it was.
• 06:35 So that's where we say for this visual, I don't want any interaction between this
• 06:38 one, and each visual I can configure individually.
• 06:41 What if I want to go back to highlight?
• 06:44 I could select that or if I wanted to use filter.
• 06:47 Filter's the same as highlight, except it doesn't preserve the stuff that is
• 06:51 no longer relevant, so it just gets rid of that.
• 06:52 And again, if I don't want it, I can set it back.
• 06:56 The key thing to be aware of in this case is that when I select another visual,
• 07:00 any modifications that I make are actually applicable to that one.
• 07:03 So I could say that I don't want this one to filter at all when I'm playing in here.
• 07:09 But this one, I want to actually go and use a filter.
• 07:13 So now I've got the mix to try and do different things,
• 07:16 no filtering, this one will filter and get rid of the highlighting.
• 07:20 And so some different options to play around with there,
• 07:22 with the visual interactions.
• 07:24 Again, when you're done with them, though, or if you don't want to leave them there,
• 07:28 you have to go back and
• 07:29 hunt down each individual one to see exactly what you changed.

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