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Quick reference
Global Visual Concepts
Concepts applicable to all visuals.
When to use
This module explores concepts that apply to the vast majority of visuals in Power BI.
Instructions
Drill Down
Activate Drill Down by dragging multiple fields from the Fields list into a visual’s field area. A classic example of this is when a date field is dragged into a chart axis and creates a hierarchy of year/quarter/month/day
- If drill down is supported for the field, it will immediately add four icons to the top of the visual
- Drill Down (single arrow) is a toggle that allows you to drill successively deeper into a single data point (Year would expand to the months for that year)
- Drill down must be turned off to select a data point, even if you are at the lowest level
- Go to next level (double arrow) is a drill down that expands to show the next level of the hierarchy without further context. I.e. All four quarters would be shown, but aggregated, not broken down by year
- Expand All Down One Level (split down arrow) will drill down to show the next level of the hierarchy segregated by the higher level. I.e. Each quarter would be shown as Year-Quarter
- Drill Up moves up one level of the hierarchy
- Unlike Drill Down, Drill Up automatically resets when it gets to the top level
Visual Interactions
By default, all visuals cross filter when a data point is selected in another visual. You can change this behavior via Visual Tools -> Format -> Edit Interactions
- Highlight (default) will preserve the totals on the selected visual while highlighting the filtered values
- Filter will filter the selected visual only, with no highlighting to show the original values
- None prevents the visual from being filtered when you select another visual
Other Options
- Focus Mode is activated by the square in the top right, showing a full screen version of the visual
- Sorting by values can be activated by clicking the … in the top right
- Data points (only) can be exported by clicking the … in the top right
- Custom formatting options are found under the paint roller in the Visualizations area
- 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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