Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Also known as "breakdown trees", this visual can show interesting statistics about the makeup of your data sets.
Exercise files
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Treeviews.pbix457 KB Treeviews - Completed.pbix
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Quick reference
Treeviews
Working with Treeview visuals in Power BI.
When to use
Treeview visuals (also known as Breakdown Trees) are useful for showing the breakdown of your data.
Instructions
Layout
- Drag your primary measure into the Values area (it will show up as a full square).
- Drag your descriptive Field into the Group area. The square will now subdivide to show the group as a proportion of your measure.
- Add a field to the Details area and your square will be further subdivided to show how each main square is built up.
- Color saturation and tooltips can also be configured.
Formatting
- Dragging multiple fields into the Group area will activate Drill Down
- Fields can be used on both the Details and in the Group area
- Dragging multiple fields into the Value area will further subdivide the data
- Visual formatting can be done via the fields under the paint roller in the Visualizations area
Hints & tips
Common Modifications for Treeview visuals
- Provide a custom title
- Turn on Data Labels
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- 00:05 This next visual that I'm gonna show you is actually one of my personal favorites.
- 00:09 This is called a tree view, which is also known as a breakdown tree.
- 00:13 And it's very useful for showing how your data breaks down into the components that
- 00:17 actually contributed to the whole.
- 00:19 It's this blocky little thing here besides the pie charts, and when I click on it,
- 00:23 it gives me this little square.
- 00:25 What I'm gonna do now is, I'm gonna open up my sales table, and
- 00:28 I'm gonna drag the primary measure that I want to use into the values area.
- 00:33 And you'll notice that when I do, I get this very beautiful square.
- 00:38 That's it, it's a big square.
- 00:40 So I can expand it, but it still looks quite the same.
- 00:42 And it's all cross filterable and everything else, but you look at it and
- 00:45 go well, whoopee, what does that do?
- 00:47 The magic for
- 00:48 this one comes in when you actually start breaking it down by different components.
- 00:52 So what kind of groupings would we like to see around this?
- 00:56 The first one logically would probably be around our locations.
- 00:59 So I'm gonna open my locations table.
- 01:01 And I'm gonna go to the location name and I'm gonna drop it in the group area.
- 01:06 And you'll notice that it now actually splits up the squares into rectangles.
- 01:11 Now what we're seeing here is that the highest seller or the location
- 01:16 with the biggest sales at the development will always be in the top left.
- 01:20 The location with the lowest or
- 01:22 smallest percentage that makes this whole thing up will be in the bottom right.
- 01:27 And basically the way that this draws, it draws from left to right, top to bottom.
- 01:32 Now, what does that mean?
- 01:34 Well, we can go and we can mouse over.
- 01:36 We can see the sales, 1.8 million, 1.81 million, it's a little bit smaller,
- 01:41 1.6 million.
- 01:42 So this was 1.83, 1.81.
- 01:46 It'll be nice to see that on a visual, though, don't you think?
- 01:48 So let's go over to our formatting icon, and let's go and turn our data labels on.
- 01:53 So now in the bottom left,
- 01:55 we can see what's actually going on here, but you know what?
- 01:58 Those data labels are a little bit small.
- 02:00 So rather than saying that we want the display to be Auto on this guy here, let's
- 02:04 say that we want the Display in Thousands, that'll give us a little bit more detail.
- 02:09 And we'll go with a value of, I don't know,
- 02:12 how about 1 decimal would probably be good for this.
- 02:15 And we'll make our Text Size just a little bit bigger.
- 02:18 Now we can see the numbers that are actually making this tree up, so
- 02:21 that's a little bit more helpful.
- 02:25 What gets interesting with this particular visual though is not when it looks
- 02:28 like this.
- 02:29 It's when we start adding more stuff to it.
- 02:32 And of course, we can go through and we can add the usual things to it.
- 02:35 We could say hey listen, I wanna see my units in tool tips.
- 02:38 So now when I go and mouse over it, we can see that we had 31,000 or
- 02:42 315,000 units that made up this particular sales for 1.5 million.
- 02:46 But what I'd like to know is I'd like to know more.
- 02:50 To get more what I'm gonna do is this.
- 02:53 I'm gonna go back to my categories table, and
- 02:55 I'm gonna drop this underneath location name.
- 02:58 And as a matter of fact, I'm even gonna go a bit bigger than this.
- 03:00 I'm gonna drag my item name underneath my category.
- 03:04 So it's activated our drop down layers.
- 03:08 I'm gonna drill down.
- 03:09 I'm gonna go into ethical development.
- 03:12 And you'll notice now that we start seeing a little bit more.
- 03:14 Wine is the biggest seller.
- 03:16 Coolers and ciders is the smallest seller, okay?
- 03:18 We'll have to take a look at draft beer for a second.
- 03:22 And when you actually take a look in this,
- 03:24 you can see all of the little products that go in and they make things up.
- 03:27 And if you can mouse over them,
- 03:28 you can see some of the different things that are actually happening there.
- 03:32 It's not really relevant what's in that square as much to say that it actually
- 03:36 doesn't make up very much.
- 03:37 The majority of my sales when I look at this are made up of four products.
- 03:42 The pint of 1516 lager, the pint of Winter Ale,
- 03:45 Cracked Frank's Members Sleeve, and this pint of Sleeman's Honey,
- 03:48 that's the biggest portion of what I actually have going on.
- 03:52 Next up would probably be the member sleeve that actually starts to,
- 03:55 well, actually it's a couple over here, member jugs and the pint feature.
- 03:59 But you can start seeing how the sales actually are built up through
- 04:03 the individual component we're using, which is kinda nice.
- 04:07 Now, there is another option that we can play with here.
- 04:10 I'm gonna drill back up to the top.
- 04:12 I wanna show you this one, too.
- 04:13 It's not one that I use, but it is available for you if you're looking at it.
- 04:18 It's the ability to add color saturation, and
- 04:21 we can do this by using a different measure.
- 04:22 So I can come back and say, give me color saturation based on budget.
- 04:27 And you'll notice in this case that the squints has the highest budget
- 04:31 of what we actually had here.
- 04:33 And if we drill down, we can see that in this case wine had the highest budget,
- 04:37 draft beer had the next highest budget.
- 04:39 If we drill down one more layer, we're not gonna get anything sensible because we
- 04:42 didn't budget to the level of item name.
- 04:45 What I don't like about this particular set up for
- 04:48 this visual is that everything uses the same color scheme.
- 04:51 And that gets really challenging when you start looking at things that
- 04:54 are at a very, very, granular level of detail and they're shaded so
- 04:58 that you can hardly see some of things like this guy in the bottom.
- 05:01 It's really hard to see that that's cooler and cider.
- 05:03 So for me, I'm not big on the color saturation.
- 05:06 I'd rather see the color breakdowns.
- 05:08 And you can control these and make them look a little different.
- 05:11 But at least this actually segregates things to make them look different.
- 05:14 So that's what I really love here.
- 05:16 It's a great visual.
- 05:17 It really tells you a lot about what's actually making up your components, and
- 05:21 I highly recommend exploring that if you haven't before.
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