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About this lesson
Cards are super useful in order to drive alerts. They also have a close cousin called the multi-row card. In this module we will explore both, as well as their pros and cons.
Exercise files
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Quick reference
Cards
Working with Cards and Multi-row Cards in Power BI.
When to use
Cards and multi-row cards are useful for showing summary statistics. Single point cards are also especially useful, as they can be used to set alerts in the Power BI service, where multi-row cards cannot.
Instructions
Creating Cards
- Select the card (or multi-row card) visual
- Drag a measure into the Fields area in the Visualizations pane
- Be aware the Cards can only have one field where multi-row cards can have many fields
Advantages of Cards over Multi-Row cards
- You can change the name displayed on a card (multi-row inherit the raw measure name only)
- Multi-row card have very limited formatting options (no alignment, all measures must be same color, etc..)
Changing name displayed on a card
- Turn off the Category Label
- Turn on the Title and name the card appropriately
- Format as desired
Hints & tips
Tricks for formatting and aligning cards
- Format the card text size under the Data Label group
- Format the card titles under the Title group
- Turn on gridlines (View -> Gridlines) for easier alignment
- Align multiple cards by holding down the CTRL key (Shift does not work) then go to Visual Tools -> Format -> Align
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- 00:05 In this video, we're going to look at cards and multirow cards.
- 00:11 What card is Is it's the idea that we want to put out a single
- 00:15 data point whether it's a key performance indicator or
- 00:18 key metric of some kind, we want a nice little bullet point that shows us a value.
- 00:24 So to create a card, we go and click on the one, two, three.
- 00:28 This is a single point card,
- 00:29 which will allow one single point of data, like sales.
- 00:34 Now, I might wanna modify this and make it look a little bit different.
- 00:37 So I'm gonna go and fool around with that right now by clicking the paintbrush icon.
- 00:42 I have the option to play with the data label and you'll notice that if I
- 00:45 change the size on this thing and I shrink it down, the $5 million will change.
- 00:49 So I can change this up.
- 00:50 I can say, I'd like to make this run a nice 20 point.
- 00:54 I can change the display on this and the point that I wanna make here is that if
- 00:58 I look at the sales measure and I go back to the modeling table,
- 01:01 you'll notice the display is with zero decimal places.
- 01:05 I can actually change this here to say I'd like to show this in thousands
- 01:10 with two decimal places.
- 01:12 And it will actually do that, regardless of what it says over here.
- 01:16 And that's kind of an important thing, we get granular control.
- 01:18 I'm going to shrink this guy down a second, and
- 01:22 then I want to take a look at the category label.
- 01:24 The category label is the thing that's showing on the bottom here.
- 01:26 This is the name of the measure.
- 01:28 Now, I could rename this if I wanted to, but
- 01:31 I don't really have a lot of options to play around with to push this to the top.
- 01:35 Maybe I want to see it above.
- 01:37 So I'm going to turn this off.
- 01:39 And then what I'm going to do, is I'm going to come up to a title,
- 01:42 turn it on and give my measure a nice new title that says Sales $.
- 01:46 It's the same as what I have for the measure, but
- 01:48 I really want it above my card.
- 01:52 I'm gonna change the font color to a nice black.
- 01:55 I think I'll change the background to yellow.
- 01:59 You'll see I get a nice little bar across the top, I'll align it center, and
- 02:03 then maybe I'll change the font size out to a nice say,
- 02:05 I don't know how about a 20 point?
- 02:07 And now I've got a nice little summary card that I can actually go and
- 02:11 put in the top of my dashboard, somewhere nicely that looks pretty cool.
- 02:15 And again it's all cross filterable as you would expect and
- 02:18 as I drill into different things it will change.
- 02:20 But it gives me that nice data point that I need.
- 02:24 What else might I wanna do with this?
- 02:26 Well you know what?
- 02:27 What if I wanted to see more data points what's the purpose of a multirow card?
- 02:31 The multirow card is this one here.
- 02:34 And if I click on him and I said, show me sales, and show me say, budgets.
- 02:40 You'll notice that it puts the values on here.
- 02:43 Now you'll notice as well that the budget is actually showing me 499.8
- 02:47 on a decimal basis there and sales is not.
- 02:50 And this is because when I go back to the budget measure,
- 02:55 it's using a general currency, and that means that with auto decimal place,
- 02:59 that means that somewhere there is a 0.8.
- 03:01 Sales, is being forced to zero decimal places but
- 03:04 I'd like to see them consistent in my multi-row card.
- 03:07 So I'll go to the formatting tab, and I'll go take a look at the data labels.
- 03:13 And you will notice we have no formatting options.
- 03:15 So basically, whatever the default is for
- 03:16 the measure, that's what we are going to get.
- 03:19 Hm, that's not so nice.
- 03:20 I'm gonna look at the category labels, I wanna put those labels above my data.
- 03:25 There is no option to do that.
- 03:27 So that's not so nice.
- 03:28 This is my challenge with the mutli-row cards, is that we don't really
- 03:33 have a lot of options to play around with theses things to make them look better.
- 03:36 We can look at the card options, I can see showing bars and whatnot.
- 03:39 But there's not really a lot of options that I need in order to change it to make
- 03:44 it look like a nice summary piece over here.
- 03:46 So for me, I don't generally tend to use too many multi-row cards.
- 03:50 What I usually do, is I'll say, you know what?
- 03:53 I'll create a bunch of single point cards, so I'm going to get rid of this particular
- 03:57 multi-row card here, and I wanna create a new card for budget.
- 04:01 So, I'm going to grab this guy, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V to copy and paste.
- 04:06 And I'll move him over here somewhere.
- 04:08 Now, I'm gonna change this guy to be budget.
- 04:12 Here's what I don't want to do.
- 04:14 I don't wanna come down and
- 04:15 say, Let's get rid of sales because at that point the card disappears.
- 04:20 Because this is a single point card, as soon as you remove the data point,
- 04:24 the visual disappears, and this happens with any visual.
- 04:26 If you remove all of the points that are in the visual, the visual goes away, says,
- 04:29 you don't need me anymore.
- 04:31 So let's go and put this back, Ctrl+V, there we are, put him back on.
- 04:35 Now I'm gonna grab Budget and move it in.
- 04:38 I'm gonna replace the field that's there, and that's great.
- 04:40 Except that you can see it doesn't change the title.
- 04:43 And that's because the title is hard coded.
- 04:45 So we'll go back over to my title and change this now,
- 04:50 to Budget $, or whatever I wanna call it.
- 04:54 Now the next thing that can be kind of painful, is how to align these guys,
- 04:57 because the multi-row cards align automatically, but
- 05:00 the single point cards do not.
- 05:03 So, one trick that you can use to help is on the view tab we have the ability
- 05:06 to show grid lines.
- 05:07 And that will actually pop up a grid line box that you can then look at and
- 05:10 then say, hey you know what?
- 05:11 Let me just go in and snap this into a particular corner here.
- 05:14 The unfortunate part is,
- 05:16 once you actually grab the next visual those borders go away.
- 05:19 But we can snap this up to the same top level and say, hey that looks pretty good.
- 05:24 If I now go and click on it, I can see that those borders about the same.
- 05:28 The other thing that we may want to do is go on to our Format tab, and
- 05:32 go on to General, this works for any visual.
- 05:35 We can actually see what the height is for this one and the width.
- 05:39 I can actually replicate those properties on the other visual as well.
- 05:43 When you're done, turn off your Show Gridlines and everything looks beautiful.
- 05:47 We now has a nice measure, that as we click through, will work.
- 05:50 And it gives us a nice summary stat that looks pretty nice.
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