- Yooo! Adam Saxton with Guy in a Cube. And in this video, I wanna
share with you five ideas to help take your Power BI reports to that next level. Just a little bit something
to help your end users. Let's do this. (upbeat music) If you are finding us for the first time, be sure to hit that subscribe
button to stay up to date with all the videos from
both Patrick and myself. All right. Some report ideas. We recently had our like
default showcase report that we use for our videos updated, shout out to Mr. Chris Hamill who helped us out on his free time. And these are just things that
you can do in your reports to just help take it to that next level. If you're like Patrick and I by default, when you create reports,
you're just throwing visuals on the canvas and you know,
it doesn't look great, but it's passable, like maybe. And so these are things to
maybe just take a little bit of extra effort to help
get you to that next level. All right, enough of all these talking, let's head over to my machine and take a look at what these are. So you can see here, I've
got a fabulous report that's got some awesome data inside of it. It looks great, right?
We're done. It's just looks great by default. I kid, I kid. So the first thing here we've got the visuals on the canvas, and this is honestly typically
what I see in terms of we just put some visuals
on the blank canvas and didn't really do
anything extra, right? We just added the fields
and we were good to go. So the first thing I wanna
call out is custom backgrounds. These can be done to help
just call out the visuals that are there, help guide the viewers from their eyes in terms
of what they want to see, and just break things up a little bit. They can be very helpful. To do that, we're gonna go
over to this paintbrush icon, we're gonna come down to page background. One thing you'll notice here, transparency's already set to 0%. I slid that down by default. That's probably gonna be 100% for you. Let's go ahead and add an image. The next thing I wanna do is do image fit, change it from normal to
fit and bam, look at that. Doesn't that really help. Remove it real quick so
you can see the before and then we'll add it back. Wow. And you can do this in easy ways that aren't complicated. Like I personally use
things like Adobe Photoshop, advanced design tools, not that I'm any good at them necessarily. But you can use tools
that you already have at your disposal. This background was actually
created in PowerPoint. So you can create things that are simple but definitely help to separate
visuals in your report. For the second item,
let's talk about themes. And you may be thinking well, okay, everything looks okay right now. But what I'm gonna do is
add in a custom theme. I'm gonna go up to the view icon, and then by default right now
I'm using the current theme, which is default. I'm gonna hit this drop and
there's other themes in here that you can play around with. I actually personally
like the storm theme, but I've got a custom theme here. So I'm gonna browse for themes, gonna hit my Guyinacube theme. You may think like, well,
nothing really changed, but pay attention to the font sizes, the actual shape of the
font, the actual colors like on the lines here, and the title, and then the States, they went
to like almost a darker blue. The Guyinacube theme, the default color we
have is a bluish color, and there is a bluish color that's very similar in the default theme. So it's not as striking
from a color perspective, but the fonts you could definitely tell. And you can customize
that either per visual, or have an all up, "Hey,
this is the default size and font that I wanna use
inside of my reports." And you can define that in the theme file. These can help illustrate
your corporate brand and also the colors for
your corporate brand. And when we think about
colors, let's also think about accessibility because
that's very important. So make sure that you're
being mindful about colors, both that they compliment each other as well as are accessible for folks that may be visually impaired. And I'll have links to some of these items down in the description
below for more information. So let me know you think about that. The third idea I wanna give you is taking your tool tips
maybe to the next level. So you can see here, even on this line chart
I've got tool tips. These are the default tool
tips that come with Power BI. And they're okay. You can actually
customize some of the look and feel of these tool tips
like just the color wise. And you can also add other
items in the tool tip dwell down below here so you
can add additional items. One thing I wanna do though is there's a concept here
called report page tool tips. I've already got one set up here. It's gonna go over to the paintbrush, we're going to come down to tool tip and change this to report page. I've already got the report page set up. And so now that I'm
using that report page, I can come in and bam, we've
got a report page tool tip, they give us a little
bit more information. Patrick's not doing too good here. So you can customize
these to add information and help call out items in your report that helps supplement the default visual. These can really be helpful when trying to tell that data story and just allow users
to get that extra info to help them make that business decision. The other thing I wanna
call out in this video, these are just the ideas, right? I'm not necessarily showing
you how to do these. I do have some links in
the description below as well as up above. You may have been seeing that come in, that talk more about these capabilities. So definitely check those out. Also, if there's something I showed that I don't have a link to a video, let me know in the comments below and we can look at doing a video on that. Definitely consider report page tool tips. They also help from a
performance perspective as well which is something
Patrick and I really like. Cause they differ execution
of certain things, which is great. The fourth item I want to
share with you is drillthrough, going from one item to another item. Let's take a look. Drillthrough can be helpful for a couple of different reasons. One is that you can drill into
just additional information for a specific item, or you
can actually help separate from a summary level
down to a detailed level. So that can be very helpful, not only from just a visual
storytelling perspective, but also from a performance perspective. So if you're going with
larger scale of data, that is something to consider as just an option for a report flow. So let's take a look at
the United States visuals. I can hover over here, we can see the great state of Texas, and if I hover over this,
you'll see a little item on the tool tip that says,
right click to drillthrough. I can select this visual like normal, but if I do click here,
I can do drillthrough, it'll go to my state detail
page, which is great. So it can have additional information. The other thing I wanna call out here that you can do as well is
conditional drillthrough. This is through the use of buttons. I'll talk about buttons here in a second. In this case, you'll see up top here it says, click a state
to enable drillthrough. If I select that state, now what we'll see is
click for state details. So the button changed to
reflect the actual selection, and then when I select that, it actually takes me to
the drillthrough page. What, that is bananas. These are different ways
that you can use drillthrough to enable an experience and
almost an app-like experience for your end users, which is great. The fifth idea I have for you is just that item I mentioned before. Buttons combined with bookmarks selections things of that nature. This really helps you take your report to an app like experience
that you can control some of that navigation and
other aspects of your report. So let's go back to our main page here. We've got two little icons
there, which are really cool. Those icons are actually built
into the background image, so they're not separate. But what we're doing is we actually have a blank
button sitting on top of it that allow us to do something. So for this part, we can open a filter
pane, or a slicer pane, and then that will allow us to
make selections accordingly, and then we can affect the
visuals that are on the page. And then when we're done,
we can close that out. Buttons can allow us to
show things and hide things. The filter button actually
displayed the slicer panel and this X button allowed me
to close the slicer panel. And that's done through bookmarks. So the bookmarks actually
control what's visible and what's not. And then the buttons allow me to activate a given bookmark that is
defined in the actual report. Let's look at another button here. We've got this little question mark. I hover over this, it
says open the info pane. And when I select that,
it actually adds a layer in here that highlights
some aspects of the report. So more context and education around how to use the actual report. And all this is doing, this
is just an image overlay, and I'm just showing the image overlay. I actually have another button
here that's sitting on top. I click on that, control click, 'cause I'm in Power BI desktop. It goes away and hides that image. Now I can just use my
report like I can normally, if I wanna go back, here we go. There's the info, and then I can hide it. That is cool. Specifically about that info panel, let me know in the comments
if you want a video on that. Another button here that
you may have noticed, we already talked about the
conditional drillthrough button, but another button you'll see
here is this decomposition. What it's going to do is actually in the current state of the report page, if i select that it will
actually change the visuals out. So it's switched the visual, and then I have this return button. If I do return, it then goes
back to the original display of the waterfall visual plus the table. So I can switch between
a view of the data. Just a little thing to
help with storytelling and to accommodate certain
aspects of a given report depending on what people wanna see. So you don't have to clutter
the entire report page with, you know, 100 visuals, I've actually seen someone do that. You can actually do some targeted visuals for the story that you're trying to tell, and maybe provide options through buttons and bookmarks to allow
people a choice of switching a given view. That's really powerful. So the buttons can be
used for switching things, we can, you know do drillthrough with conditional drill through, we can show and hide things, we can do all sorts of amazing
things with buttons, right? Those were just a few ideas
to get the blood flowing, get your idea, your brain going in terms of what you
can do in your report. Let me know in the comments
below what you think. If you have other ideas for report design and data storytelling, I definitely want to hear it. Let us know. If you liked this video, be sure to hit that big thumbs up button, smash it if you so desire. If it's your first time here,
hit that subscribe button and as always from both
Patrick and myself, thank you so much for watching. Keep being awesome, and we'll see you in the next video.
