5 Power BI Card Tricks *not* many know - Use them to improve your reports

five card visual tricks i got four of them listed here and the fifth one is hidden i'll show that to you at the end of the video the four tricks that we will cover first are a stylized card so this is my normal card this is my stylized card that has a nice rounded effect and shadow effect and then this is a conditionally formatted card depending on how big the number is the color will change so 50 is good but if i pick something that is 40 percent it will change to this color or negative it will get into red color and then left aligned card by default the kpi card visual or the card visual can only show the values in the center so how to get it left aligned for certain reports how to do that and then the fourth trick is to toggle between a card versus visual so here i got my card but if i click on that little graph i'll get a pie chart representation of the data and i can go back to my card visual so those are the four tricks let's finish these four and then i'll reveal the fifth one just like a magician who will reveal their fifth trick at the end of the show so let's get started with the simple card to insert a card you simply click on the card visual here it'll add a visual to your screen you can resize and move it wherever you want and put any measure or an implicit value there and it will calculate the result so for the purpose of this exercise let's use the measure profit percentage because the technique really works with any kind of measures or anything in your data model i'm not going to go into the detail of what is there we'll just assume you got some dax running and some values written so this is how the default card visual looks now let's turn this into that thing we'll go to the format options here and from there we can select the background and add a background color so i'm just going to pick something nice and bright like that that will give a nice coloring there we could use the data label options to change the font family the font family by default is d-i-n i have really no idea what d-i-n is it's probably device independent but you could use something that is a bit stronger so for example aerial black or my favorite sego ui bold this looks nice and crisp and it kind of aligns with the rest of the default phone choices within power bi and you can even change the color of this font so let's make it nice and bright there so that it contrasts well with our blue color and category label as well i'm gonna turn that into dull blue color so we're already going from that shape to this shape but the borders and the shadow effect are not there this is again very easy to add select the visual go here and from border you can enable the border and add a radius of maybe 10 pixels so that this is how it will look the only drawback of this border approach is it will add a border as well which is usually in black color or blue color or whatever but you can match the border color with the background color so that's what i've done here and now we just get like a rounded edge shape without any border although the border is technically there the final step is to add shadow effect so you can again enable the shadow on it and the default shadow looks all right but if you're not happy with that you can customize it so that's our first trick let's take a look at the second card trick which is the color of the card the background color should change depending on what value is presented so for example let's say it needs to be green whenever our profit is more than 50 percent and it needs to be you know some sort of amber color when it is between 50 and 0 and if it is negative then it needs to be in red color so this is what we are trying to achieve this is very easy to do all you got to do is first make your card and then go to the format options background color and from here instead of a fixed color we will use a conditional formatting rule on the color so there is an effects button you will find this fx button next to many places so for example you could have the label color itself change you could have category label color change all of those things can be done but we will use it for background color and let's click effects and then you can specify what type of rule you want the default rule is color scale so it will go from light blue to dark blue based on how big the profit percentage is we don't want a continuous scale like this because this can be very confusing and it can add more noise than meaning to the report so we will go to the rule-based format and this will give you kind of like distinct break points for your rule so we want to base the rule on the form profit percentage field and simply specify what roles we want if the value is greater than minimum and less than let's just say 0 that means it any profit up to 0 we want the color to be this then the new rule is anything that is greater than 0 and less than 0.5 the color needs to be this thing and then finally anything greater than 0.5 and then less than we'll just delete this what this will do is it will make it like maximum so anything from 0.5 all the way up until your maximum value will be the green color so we set up a rag scale here red amber green and when you click ok you'll get this nice little value there and you can switch to a different value to see how that color changes the only thing to keep in mind is going back to the first trick where i showed you the border color needs to match the background color so here we didn't apply the same rule for the border color so the border color kind of sticks out like a sore thumb one thing that you could do is you could either remove the border altogether or add another rule on the border color as well to synchronize that with this same goes for your label color to add contrast i didn't bother with anything i simply changed this to white color which is neutral and category label as well to the white so that it kind of doesn't really matter all right so that is our second trick let's take a look at the third one which is left aligned card so if you select any card if you go to the data label there is no alignment option here as it i say as it because power bi is changing every month so next month they might even add that alignment option but so far there hasn't been an alignment choice for us so how do we get a left aligned card for certain report well you can cheat so that's what i have done i will add instead of a card i will add a multi-row card and then in this multi-row card we will just put our profit percentage that is the only measure that goes there and we will format it in such a way that it looks like a regular card start by resizing it and then select the card we'll go here we will add a background color so let's just say the background color needs to be this color there and then data label color is that no this text size needs to be very big so we'll make it like 40 points or something and the font family also needs to be something nice and strong like that already our card here looks almost like the kpi but there are some minor differences there is a horizontal line here so we will go here we will go to the card and then there is a show bar option if you disable it the bar is gone well then adjust the category label as well let's just make it a little darker so it contrasts well and if needed add your border radius of 10 pixels and match the border color with the background color so that we already get this kind of a view and there is our left align kpi card okay time now for the fourth trick which is a kpi card that can be shown as a number or a pie chart so how to make this kind of a thing well this is where you use the bookmark feature of power bi to set up both visuals and then toggle between one versus another so what we need is we need a regular kpi card i'll just make a copy of this ctrl c ctrl v so we got this kpi card and then we will add one more visual which is a pie chart this donut chart i keep saying pie chart but what we use it is actually a donut chart and then here we will just put cost and profit both of them together add up to the overall picture so we'll just say total cost total profit so this is my graph we'll just format it quickly so that it looks a little clean with less labeling and everything so we now have both of these options our kpi and our graph will just make sure that they are the same size so we'll put one on top of another and resize them to match their size at this point they're kind of sitting one on top of another all good now all we need to do is hide one and show the other whenever we click on the choices so the choices are show the pie chart or show the number well show the donut chart really so we will insert some icons to trigger this flow you can go to insert and either make a button or a shape or my favorite is to add an image so i got these images here i'm just gonna copy paste them and reuse that so we got those images and now we will need to create two states of the report first state is when the card is shown and the second state is when the pie chart alone is shown so to set up the states we will go to view click on bookmarks and selection panel so these two are necessary to set up this process if you have never done a bookmark then this is probably a good place to learn how to do the bookmarks but if you have already done you can kind of skip ahead to the section where that setup is done so here you can see that all of the option all of the objects on the page that are laid out you can select anything and then you can see that this thing is called profit versus cost and then that image is called image normally you may want to give these names but we'll just uh live with that for now so we'll click on this particular pie chart thing we will hide it using that little eyeball icon likewise at this state my report only shows the number and i want to save a bookmark for this particular state of the report so right now once the setup is done we will add a bookmark it will be called bookmark 3 or whatever just double click and name it so we'll name this as show the kpi card notice that i already have other bookmarks on the page so these are for that setup right now we will have show the kpi card next up we will disable the visibility of that so that the graph comes to the front and then we will hide the kpi card which is behind it so now the kpi card is invisible the graph is visible at this state again we will add one more bookmark this one we will call this as show the donut so we now have two bookmarks i can just remove my selection pane now and i can click on one of them to see the kpi card and the other to see donut so two bookmarks each triggering different states of the report at this point all we have to do is attach the bookmark to these buttons so click on this i button when i click on the i button i want to see my kpi number so we'll select that we'll go to the action options of the image enable the action and the bookmark that it will have is show kpi card notice that it was already having kpi bookmark there simply because i copy pasted these buttons there so it kind of inherited that we'll do the same for this guy here we'll select that go to action and then say the action for this is show the donut at this point we can even remove the bookmarks panel because we have attached the bookmark to the action of the image i can simply hold down my control and click on i or click on the pie chart to see either of them when you publish this report to the web you don't have to hold down the control you simply click on them they will act like buttons and they will show what is being clicked and selected so those are the four kpi card tricks now let's get into the fifth one which is like the grand finale let's just say you have learned something valuable from this video and you created a nice looking fancy kpi card now you have realized that on your report you don't have just one kpi card but you have these other kpi cards as well and you would like to format all of them in the same way and neatly lay them out on the report how to do this quickly that's the fifth trick simply select your original card go to home and click on format painter you may not have realized this but power bi has been having this format painter option for quite a while now using which you can take the formatting of one visual and apply it to other visuals so we'll click on the format painter click on each one of them so now all the four kpi cards are looking like the original one but they're all having different sizes and different places we would like to lay them out nicely on the left hand side of the screen one under another how to do that well just move them around so right now they're all there but they're all not matching their size so we'll select the first one go to the format options go to general make a note of their width and height so it's 247 120 and then click and drag on all the other ones so that you pick everything now all the four are selected when you have all of these multi selected you can again go to the format general and let's all adjust one go so two four seven and then i think this one is 120. we'll just move these around you don't have to perfectly align them just place them close enough and then select everything go to the format option and from here using the alignment tools you can align them all to the left as well as distribute them vertically what this will do is it will give them even space between the boxes so that they all look nice and tidy when you create a report hey i hope you found those five card tricks very useful if you would like to learn a little bit more about power bi here is a video that will help you out thank you so much i'll catch you there bye [Music] you

Channel: Chandoo

Views: 69,042

Keywords: chandoo, chandoo.org, power bi tutorial, power bi dashboard design, powerbi, card visual formatting tricks, kpi cards for dashboard, power bi dashboard tips, power bi reports, power bi bookmarks demo, how to create bookmarks in power bi, how to use bookmarks in power bi, switch between card and chart in power bi with bookmarks, left aligned card powerbi, conditional formatting card in powerbi, rule based CF powerbi

Id: 7RKxD7andMQ

Length: 15min 22sec (922 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 18 2022