How to Create Beautiful Power BI Dashboards 📊 Using the Power Pattern⚡

in this video I'm going to show you how to create effective power bi dashboards that will make you look like a superstar what I want to share with you today is something really valuable it's called the power pattern and I've developed this over many years and it is thoroughly battle-tested so this actually predates power bi because of course dashboards are nothing new so I'm used this for a decade or more with bar bi and with other tools before that and it's incredibly effective and it's based on the best principles of visualizations design and not just that it has been battle tested in lots of companies the world over and not just by me but by hundreds of my students in my learn power bi program as well but even though it is so powerful and so robust but still it is simple and easy to use and one things that makes it is so effective is that it's also easily adaptable and extendable so I'm not giving you like a one-size-fits-all like yep me your whole dashboard should look like this but like this but I'm giving you a framework based on the best principles best practices and you can use that to easily adapt and extend it and I'm not guarantee that it's going to fit your needs regardless on the industry or your role that for which you're building your dashboard so what we're gonna do is we're gonna cover this video in two segments step one I'm gonna show a demo and I like doing that I like kind of showing you to you before I start talking about it you know theory and how well yeah we'll keep that for later and that is important but we're gonna come back and talk about the principles and also variations and that's where I'll talk about how you can take this power pattern and extend it and adapt it for your own needs now if you do need additional help or feedback on your dashboard then make sure to check out our dashboard makeover the link is right there learn power bi comm slash makeover and we're also gonna link it in the corner and in the description down below now this video focuses on visualizations dashboards but if you're just getting started or keep getting stuck in power bi make sure to check out or a complete step-by-step power bi tutorial and that's also linked in the corner and in the description below let's get going my name is avi Singh I'm a Microsoft MVP and best-selling power bi author and if you want to become a power bi pro make sure to subscribe and click that bell so you're notified whenever I go live to answer your power bi questions alright so let's go to our step one which is the demo so here we are in power bi desktop and before we go any further I would like to clarify the term dashboard now what is a dashboard so there is an industry definition of dashboard and I grabbed here a quote from Stephen for you but you know you can use this shorthand that I sometimes use which is that says screen full of useful information now the dashboard as the term is conventionally used and that's what I'm talking about in this video is not what power bi calls a dashboard power bi dashboard is something very specific and let me show you an example so power bi dashboard is actually the scrolling display which is really neat and nice and displays very nicely on the mobile devices and that's great but for our purposes we're not talking about that we're talking about what in power bi is called a report page but again which which aligns closer to the stand industry standard definition of dashboards so we're gonna take basically an empty sheet map page here and just fill that with useful information following our power pattern alright let's get going so first thing that I want to talk about is this idea that your screen you should treat this as real estate and every pixel is valuable here but some pixels some real estate is more valuable than others right so imagine like an exclusive neighborhood close to your home and right I mean obviously that real estate is far more valuable the same principle applies with visualization as well and typically because we scan things the way we read we scan in this direction kind of like a Z because again we read in that manner so what that means is as far as visualization go this is extremely prime real estate so this is really valuable and in general the top section is really valuable as well so one thing that I would recommend is avoid putting any logos or things like that here you can put logos probably in in this corner which is the least valuable or if you don't want to put it in that corner then maybe put it in that corner so we're gonna go in here and let's just start with the name of the report that's a fair thing to put in this corner over here although if you can avoid sometimes you can even put the name in you know in a different location where it's not taking up the prime real estate so we're gonna build a sales report and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add a filter so again this is the adventure works database and again the tutorial power bi tutorial 60-minute probably a tutorial that I pointed out to has how exactly we built this underlying model so you can use that so we're just using that model and I'm going to grab a first of all that calendar and I'm going to add a filter to the year over here okay all right and I'm just setting my dashboard up for now perfect so we have that and what I have is again some measures that I've already defined so I'm gonna drag in a year selected and I'm gonna change that to a visualization of maybe this card type let's see how that looks perfect so that looks nice so this is kind of my label and again I'm you know if you can manage then well let's see let me show you what next I'm gonna put over here alright so the next thing that goes on there is what I call the high level numbers which give you the high level picture of exactly what's going on so I'm gonna drag sales there and put this I like using the big bold card visual so I'm gonna switch to that and that looks really good and I'm gonna maybe do the same for sales prior year so you know I'm putting these high level numbers up there and then let's do a year-over-year change for sales and your percentage change now I apologize this is adventureworks data so it it doesn't the numbers unfortunately are not very realistic they look a little bit weird so these are our high level numbers and that's the step kind of one in power pattern that I like putting the high level numbers of right up top so right at the top you you know you give them a snapshot of hey how is everything going how is it compared to prior year and of course depends on the report so it depends on what you're trying to show these measures can vary but the idea is that you're showing the high level numbers up top and give me a second I'm just gonna put the logo and stuff on this corner and then we'll keep going all right so I put the logo there and again if you can manage you can also stick the logo down here because again logo is not conveying data is not conveying information it's just kind of static as just an aesthetic element so might as well place it in the least important position you can for now I'll just leave it here but again recommend you kind of place it here all right so what we're gonna do is we're gonna do something to highlight these high level numbers more and of course you would do some real cleanup in the report make sure the width is all lined up right I didn't quite do it here but I'm gonna go ahead and add a rectangle and move it over here and and again you just need a light touch with the color so I actually don't need definitely don't need this fill so let's make it transparent maybe even 75% I am gonna move it to the back so format send to back and again a light touch is great so there's this idea of pixel economy which is that most things on the page should can weigh data and data pixels should be economized all right so there's a little bit of cleanup I would like this to be darker I'll show you the finished version where this all cleaned up before now we'll keep going so again high level numbers at the top and from here on things are pretty easy because what we gonna do is do some breakdowns and some trends now for a second I'm gonna switch you to the relationship view and so for those who have seen my 60 minute tutorial they would know that in there I talked about the data and look of tables and I talked about the who what where when how in and if you follow those principles it's gonna transfer over real easy to building of the dashboard because those are the important elements so that's how we're gonna take our big number and then just show different breakdowns based on who what where one how so maybe here we can start with what so we can show a breakdown by category and then maybe within subcategory I'm just gonna use that as a drill down right so we have that and I'm gonna change these to you know what are these called column bar columns next time up bar chart all right so so we have one breakdown showing basically what like what was sold and we're gonna have copy paste this element and we're gonna change this to well where did we sell it so that's another lookup table and that is territories so we go in here and we can add country and region again as a drill down perfect right so so now we have got a country and if if you wanted to drill down to the United States and see Southwest Northwest all of that is working great let's do one other breakdown off like who is buying this alright so and that is our customer service again who what where when how similar to how we built up our model that's the that's the you know almost always the first iteration of what I've built for my clients and again this is power pattern is not the be-all end-all this is a great starting point and this is exactly how I build the first version of dashboard at that you know I showed my clients and when I start working on a project all right so cool so we have kind of what what did we sell so the product and where did we sell it that's a territory region who did we sell it to and then finally let's add let's add a trend and we're gonna make this a line chart and we definitely don't need country and region here what we need is a calendar month so I'm gonna grab that put that on the axis and besides sales we also gonna add sales prior year and now we have that perfect so again this is that kind of the second area in about power patterns so the first area was a high level numbers the second year is breakdown and trends and they're no set rules about this but generally if you have a well-structured model you're gonna slice and dice and show the breakdowns and trends based on this who what where one have tables all right so we're back here and what we're gonna do next is is just add a little bit of detail not this is where people who are often coming from maybe a heavy Excel background they put a lot of details and a lot of tables on there so what we're gonna do is let's say I'm gonna add customer let's grab full name all right and let's add sales on it and we're gonna sort it descending my sales and I'm gonna turn the totals off because what I'm trying to do is is I'm trying to show only the top in so let me zoom in here so I'm gonna show top n which is 10 by sales so show me top 10 by sales and if you go we only have top 10 customer by sales and I'm gonna do the same thing for product but I'm not gonna I'm gonna skip ahead just to you know save some time so that's it that's our bar pattern we have high-level numbers up top we have breakdown and entrain and we have a little bit of detail and again this is a great starting point for you and even this often just blows my clients away especially when they realize that how fully interactive this is right I mean they can just click on United States and everything else is gonna filter down to just the United States of course there's drill down and all sorts of other functionalities now you can build on this but but yeah this is definitely a good starting point so let's go back and recap some of the principles we used here and talk about the variations and how we can extend this pattern all right so let's talk about this but again one more reminder if you do need additional help or feedback on your dashboard make sure to check out our dashboard makeover and the links are in the corner and in the description so the power pattern we talked about how the top at the top left and the top areas in general are valuable screen real estate so don't waste that on try not to waste on a company name logo try not to put slicers or some other things there which are not really data all right so so save that for something good which which is valuable and I did see me use the really simple elements and I think they work best especially kind of starting out we will talk about variations in a second but you know basically line chart bar column charts and table or it's friends so matrix card I all think of them kind of like table like elements right so you can use either of those so sticking to the simple elements is indeed good and so again the structure the way we structured it was show high level numbers right up top so everybody can can kind of just say it okay cool what this is how we're doing and then you can show kind of breakdowns and trends and after that you have a little bit of detail there show selected detail not too much let's talk about variations so slicers I usually try to put the slicers if I can make space then over on this side so again you don't want to put slicers here because this part is generally more valuable than the part over here because again we scan in this manner so slicers they're not data I mean they're useful you want them there so you put them on this corner so that's my preferred place for slicer if you do need to place them there breakdowns and trends you can you can totally kind of mix and match right so I just showed you kind of an example you can go the way you kind of see fit so that's totally up to you and it's gonna depend on your data your data set additional visual types by all means I'm not saying only use the simple elements but you should have a good reason to stay is to stray from this and if you want to use a different chart just be very sure that oh this is why I'm using it and this is a more effective visual in my case don't use it just because it looks cool make sure that it's effectively conveying the data another tip that I use is often I repeat the pattern so what do I mean by that well let's go back to this so once you develop a pattern and again you can adapt this pattern to fit for your own needs but you can let's say right now I'm showing a sales report then what I'll do is I'll do another report or another report page for them and and I'll use the exact same pattern and users love it because now when they're going from page to page they're not like each page is completely different visually it follows the same structure so it you really just take some a second to orient them so I know exactly what I'm looking at and it follows the same pattern and now it's just showing me shipping you know by country by category right so so build a pattern for yourself at least in a report and see if we can reuse that pattern and you know so that's another tip that I have and once you do this basic step the first dashboard that I show my clients is always really simple and of course you've heard me talk about the agile approach to BI right so start with something really simple and then you can go on and incorporate additional techniques as you see fit of course there's conditional formatting report base tooltips drill through pages and and a lot more so again if you do want to learn more and get additional help then go head over to learn power bi comm slash makeover one last tip and I'm gonna share is after you publish the report online and you would want to pin you know that the page that you've created to your power bi dashboard then you can use this button bin a live page and what that's going to let you do once you click on that you can select the power bi dashboard where you can pin it on and that and remember that's the scrolling thing that we talked about earlier and the whole report page is gonna show up on your power bi dashboard so that's it from my side my friends you have additional power bi dashboard design tips then make sure to leave that in a comment let us know or if any of these tips were helpful to you then let us know as well I'll see you next time until then baran and keep watching for the next videos [Music]

Channel: Avi Singh - PowerBIPro

Views: 84,633

Rating: 4.7700534 out of 5

Keywords: how to create a power bi dashboard, power bi dashboard, power bi create dashboard, how to create dashboard in power bi, power bi report, power bi visualization, power pattern, power bi dashboard makeover, dashboard makeover, power bi tutorial, mspowerbi, Power BI Pro, PowerBIPro, Avi Singh, power bi, powerbi

Id: 3nvjjfE9BqQ

Length: 18min 28sec (1108 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 06 2019