Use REFERENCE LABELS to add INSIGHTS to your KPI CARDS in Power BI // Feature Walkthrough

in this video I'm going to show you how you can add reference labels to your card visuals in your parb airports we're going to go through each of the new elements that they've added as well as some improvements that they've made to the new card visual all of that and more so without further Ado let's get started hi my name is fan and welcome to the solutions abroad YouTube channel where we cover tips tricks and best practices when working with powerbi I upload new videos every week so make sure you hit that subscribe button and the bell icon to get notified when a new one is out so the November 2023 feature updates for parbi has been released and with it came this new feature the reference labels which lets you add more context and labels to your card visuals and this feature is really cool because it lets you add a lot more interesting information about your kpis in the same card visual without using any custom Solutions at all so let me show you so as usual here we're going to start with a fairly simple data model and I've already set up the visual that I wanted to show you so we have way to choose the months here in a slicer panel here we have a card visual here which is just using the default card visual in powerbi and we have just the line chart here which is just for reference just shows you how the sales change on a month by month basis and at the moment we're using the Northwind data set which is the data set that we always use and uh just to give you context it's a small subsets of the Northwind data sets that is that has information about this company that sells Goods grocery Goods internationally so here as I change the context of the month you'll see that the sales value on this card also changes it gives you the sales for that month the total sales for that month so this is driven by a measure we just call it sales and it's essentially just a calculation by multiplying unit price against the quantity just to get the total sales now being able to select and see what are the total sales for every month is especially useful however we might or your users might want to see more information than just the total sales for that month maybe they want to see let's say how are we doing compared to the previous months or maybe if that's sales is for that month is above or below the Target and this is where the reference labels becomes handy so what we're going to do is we're going to start by converting this card into the new card visual so right here that lets you add the reference labels in this visual type so we're going to open up the format and by the way if you cannot see the new card visual you just want to make sure that you are up to date to at least the November version of harbi desktop and you need to make sure that you have the option enabled in your preview features so if I go open up here preview features you just need to make sure that the new card visual is enabled here in the settings so once you're here and once you've selected it um as you know the new card visual you can have multiple cards in the same visual but at the moment we're just going to stick with one card here so as I selected that you can see that there is a new option for for you here or actually there are a few options but we're going to focus right now on the reference labels as you can see you can add a bunch of things here and you can add titles values details they're all deselected at the moment that's because we don't have any labels yet so let's add our first label which is comparing or seeing what the previous sales were so what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a new measure so click here new measure we're going to just start typing sales previous month like this I'm going start with a calculate use the sales measure that we've already created and very simply just use previous month and use the dates as our value here so now what it will do is it will just give us so if I just add it here you will notice that it will just give us what the value is or what the sales value is for last month however we don't want that in this card we want it as part of a reference label in that same card so I'm going to just delete that and then we're going to add it here in the data label for the sales card so we going to drag sales PM there and as you noticed as I added that label a few other things in this options in this reference labels options have been enabled so things like the title value and detail and we're going to go through them individually right now so the first thing that you might have noticed is that when we added a label here the sales PM it also still lets you add more data here which means that under the sales pm here you can add more information more references with regards to what you're showing in that card which is especially handy if you want to give more context or more information than just one reference label so it lets you add I guess as many as you can row by Row the other thing that is interesting is that um you don't just add for for this one for example sales PM you don't just or you don't need to just stick with just showing value here you can also add some context to it so to give people or your users some understanding with regards to what that value actually means so we might be showing what the value is previous months but uh we might want to show for example is that good or bad I mean they can see that it's going to be higher compared to last month but we might want to use some visual cues or some colors to you know show at a glance if we are doing good or bad compared to to the previous month so in that or in those details there are a bunch of other things that you can customize or even add more details um using the value and detail options here so at the moment so let's go through some of these things so first of all we're going to select a label that we want to customize so I guess so since you can add multiple labels it lets you choose which one you want to customize and at the moment we only have one so I'm going to select that one so as I selected that you'll see that the context in the title bit changes and this is what is showing here the sales PM right here so if you want to keep the name as it is that's fine however if you want to customize that you can click custom here and it lets you just customize how you want to show that in your reference label so I'm going to just name it last month and maybe make it a little bit smaller like this and then uh you have other things here that you can customize so you can customize the text as well to be dynamic if you wanted to you can customize the color of that if you wanted to you can change the transparency there's bunch of other custom formatting options that you have to customize this title now you can also turn it off if you didn't want a title and you just wanted a value but in this case we wanted to just leave it as it is so the next thing that we are going to look at is the value which is the the number value that we are showing here so again we can customize that like for example we might want to remove decimal places we just want to keep it in the same decimal place as the top value which is fine so one interesting thing about the values here is that you can set the blanks to show however you want instead of having to write it on your Dex itself so if there is a blank value you can just simply add the dashes here and it won't show that big blank text on this section of your reference labels so the next thing that you might want to add is a detail to your reference label because you might want to as I mentioned before add some more context to this value so for example in this case you might want to say if or or how big of a percentage jump that is in between months and you want to show that in a percentage value so that your users don't have to calculate now you can do that right now here using this detail section so here you can drop the data or the measure the calculation here in the data well so we don't really have that yet so I'm going to just we're just going to create it quickly together so we're going to go new measure and then we're going to call it month on Monon percentage like this first I'm going to create a variable to hold our percentage value so divide the sales against the sales previous month minus one that just gives us the percentage value or the percentage difference and then now we're going to turn the value and make sure that it's formatted in the same way or in the right format that we want because the arrows that I want to add is is fairly custom so we're just going to add it as part of our Dax return value which is fine so we're going to format the value of the percentage here to show no decimals like this and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to concatenate it as well with an if statement like this and I'm going to say if the percent value is greater than zero I want to add an up Arrow otherwise I want to show a down arrow so the up Arrow I'm going to click Windows dots which will bring up the keyboard here going to use this uh up arrow and then for this one Windows dot again show the down arrow like this cool so now that we have that we we can now add that in the detail section here and here we go it's showing us how big of a jump that is compared to previous month so 4% up compared to last month we can make that Bolder you know give it some or make it more distinct compared to the value and what's really interesting about this is that you can add backgrounds or customize backgrounds and font colors of your details which we can use to our advantage so in this case for example we might want to add or show the color if the value is going up or down so if it's up we want to show as green if it's going down we want to show as red and let's customize that here in the conditional formatting so we'll hit FX we'll go and uh adjust based on rules and we'll change what we are checking using the percentage measure that we've just created now instead of creating some complex Dax or creating some new Dax code we can just simply use what we have written as our let's say like a tag so here we're checking because it's a text value that is returning you can use text Tex rules uh so we're going to add two text rules here and we're just going to check if the value contains the arrows that we've just added right so if it's uh if it contains the up Arrow so I'm going to click Emoji again here and say if if it's up then it should be green one of these greens I'm going to copy this one like this and then if it contains the down arrow then we're going to have the red as its font so fairly easy so now as you can see it gives you that color a change of that color font but we're not done yet because we can also customize the color of the background so if we do another FX here do the same thing based on rules change to check the month on month add those rules to say if it contains add the arrows themselves like this and then we'll add the colors the same colors as before and then we'll adjust the transparency here let's say 80% there we go so now as you change your selection so does the the comparisons so you see if the sales is less than previous month the color changes to red and then vice versa it shows as green so perfect you've now created your first reference labels in your card visuals in parbi now let's try to create another one just to show you how that workflow looks like because it's going to be fairly similar to what we've just done so what we're going to do is we're going to go click our card yeah click our card right here and then we're going to go back to the reference labels and we're going to add the new data here so I'm going to create a new measure just a fake Target it's going to be the same but if you had some Target to compare against this is where where this is how you would set it up right so I'm just going to just make it perpetually below Target it's always like that so now you can add that Target in your data label so as you can see it added a new reference label below the first one and you can at the moment we are selecting the sales PM as the label that we're customizing but if you switch that to the targets you can customize the Target by themselves like this so for example you might want to show or let's just make them similar so make this one a little bit smaller the value we can change that to bold maybe or maybe just add a transparency but that's it so you can add more reference labels like this fairly easily so now that you know how to add reference labels let's look at the other options here that we haven't really looked at in the ref reference labels bit of the new card visual so here we have the few things here like layout and spacing which you can't really customize and that's because you have the selected series to one of the reference labels now if you select just all you'll notice that a bunch of them will be enabled for you to customize so for example the divider you you can customize that so that's the divider between the actual value to your reference label so you can customize its color its transparency the width of it you can even ignore padding to to like give or or or have that padding bits on the left and right hand side of those reference labels the next thing that you can also customize is the layout of your reference labels so at the moment they are in rows and in sentences but if you had a use case for it you can change this into columns so as you notice it creates like Columns of data to organize your reference labels in columns I don't really like that view but if you have a use case for it that's available for you on the rows you can change it from a sentence into a tabular so at the moment it makes a lot more sense for me anyway to have them in sentences and then just kind of make some formatting changes to make them look distinct between each other you can also change them to be like Center align vertical aligned to you know make them you know look aligned I'm going to just revert that back now you can also customize their spacing in between each other so spacing in between the labels the outer padding so the paddings here and then you can also add images so if you wanted to add image actually this is not new to the reference labels but or or to the new card visual but you can add an image if you wanted to like for example let's just click browse here and let's add a loading one here so you can see you can add images to your cards fairly easily what else so a new Improvement that they've made to the new card visual Without Really announcing it is some options here that you have which is the accent bar now previously you couldn't really customize this accent bar you can just change the color of it statically but now you can change that using a conditional color so if you want to for example let's just increase the width of it it's really interesting because now you can use the color of the accent bar as a means to show if that kpi is doing good or bad in general which is going to be based on some Dynamic formatting you can also customize where it shows which you previously couldn't as far as I remember you couldn't and now you can change it to either at the top or to the left anywhere in your card really which is really handy so now you can add the reference labels as many as you want but what's again really cool is that you have so many ways to add more context to your card visuals because now you have the reference labels but if you wanted to add more details to your cards or your card collection in general you can use the title and subtitle which again is another feature that was released a few few months back so this gives you just a lot more ways to add context to your cards fairly easily and fairly quickly and that's really it for this video I hope that was not too long-winded and I hope that has given you some kind of tips or some understanding with regards to this new feature the reference labels that have just come out for powerbi thanks for watching as usual give this video a like if you found it useful give it a dislike if you didn't so to do better for next time ask your questions in the comment section box below so I can help you and you can help others if you like this video we have a patreon page where you can support the channel and get exclusive perks like Early Access demo files and credits at the end of these videos thanks again for watching and see you in the next one bye-bye

Channel: Solutions Abroad

Views: 3,014

Keywords: solutions abroad, power bi, powerbi, power bi tutorials, power bi for beginners, beginners guide to power bi, data analytics, dax, data modelling, data visualisation, business intelligence, how to power bi, power bi how to, power bi best practices, power bi tips and tricks, power bi standards, power bi patterns, power bi help, power bi tips, power bi 2023, power bi kpi, power bi card, power bi reference, power bi insights, power bi reference label, power bi compare

Id: s1MPRl6ha7o

Length: 17min 59sec (1079 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 10 2024