Using Small Multiples in Power BI to Improve Analytical Value

hello and welcome to another video here at pragmatic Works my name is Mitchell Pearson and in this video I'm going to show you how to make a couple small tweaks and small changes using built-in features not custom visuals to make the visual that you see on the screen much better much clearer and much more relevant there's a lot of really cool built-in features that exist within powerbi and within the formatting of the individual visualizations that exist in fact every month Microsoft is making new updates and new changes and it's easy to let little things go by and even when you might be using a tool there's a possibility you might not be fully leveraging the capabilities within the formatting and I had this happen recently I was working with a customer and they had a visual that was similar to this right they had sales by year and they had the country on the legend and they were trying to compare like this this metric for this country but across years and I'm like I really don't like the way that looks so now we're at a situation of do we switch to like a line chart and have the various countries as their own line or do we maybe do something else and what I wanted to do and what I encourag the customer to do was I said let's do small multiples right so let me show you real quick as we're getting started the finished product um that I just threw together here and then I'll show you kind of how we get there and get to that finished product so this right here is the same chart clustered column chart right there same exact chart I used on the other report but the big difference is that I put the country on small multiples and I really love this View and I'm going to talk about it and then I'm going to show you very briefly in this video how to set this up so what I've done here is I have each of the different countries kind of in their own small box so now I'm looking at France I can see France across 2005 6 7 and8 and how it's trending I also put in here a nice awesome little x constant line to say look this is what it was before Co and this is what we've done after Co and that could be anything that could be before we change marketing campaigns before we did our renovation before we did this this this before we started selling this new product right so I really love this kind of this constant line that I have separating my x-axis here as well and then there's a little bit of a shade you also noticed that I have these these kind of benchmarks that we've put in here these are also static values hey if you're above this Benchmark you're doing excellent average maybe a little bit of room for improvement if you will right and so this is just and I could have done a little bit more here as far as making this look better I did throw this together pretty quickly but that's the thing if you know where to look you can make these visuals pretty I think effective with just a couple of small changes so let me show you how we can do that real quick I'm actually going to go back over here and I'm going to make changes to this one right so the first thing that I'm going to do is grab what's on the legend and move it down to small multiples right there and I'm just a little bit in the way here so let me do this there you go we put it on small multiples and so I put the country on small multiples so that separates it but you'll notice that if this is all you do it really doesn't look all that good right I'm not a big fan of this so the first thing that I wanted to do and I'll have to look for this a little bit as we're going through it is I wanted to have six representation windows so three columns across I wanted to separate them you'll notice I have this nice little border here this border that kind of clearly distinctly separates them um those are a couple quick things I want to do right so if I go into formatting for this visual here the first thing I'm going to do is turn on my data labels so the data labels are on uh that's a really easy property to turn on and set up I'm also going to turn on the background for the data labels like so there we go so that's going to kind of be relevant later on so let me go ahead and turn that off and then under columns you can change the colors here so I wound up to separate the different years I kind of just went with a little purple here right so I went with like a dark purple and I just walked down the line here a little bit um kept it very simple but you can obviously fit it into whatever your color palette is but this is just to separate the ear so I can kind of look if I wanted to compare Canada for 2008 to Australia for 2008 you'll have that right there under small multiples this is where I can come in and I can put in my number of um columns so what that'll do is allow me to put Australia Canada and France all vertical here uh like I did before instead of there just being two columns and two rows and then having to have a scroll bar I also want to do a border and this is where you can put that separator in there which I think for small multiples is a big deal but it's just a little click right so if I click on right here horizontal in vertical it gives me that and then you can go in and of course change it so I wound up doing something a little bit thicker and I went with a gray color maybe a little bit more gray than that something like that so that separates it then you can come in here and you can change like the title The boldness the thickness um another thing I like to do is I always like to do this on my visuals I always like to like add a little Shadow I think it makes them pop out a little bit and it separates them I think that helps out a lot so this is so far pretty cool right I think even by itself like this is good but the customer I was working with that I was helping out they wanted to do a little bit more right and so if you look at what we have right now and you compare that to this it's very similar but this one has some interesting little thresholds and some benchmarks right that we put in here and that's what I want to show you now how can we go in there and do that and the title is the title right if you want to change the title on this visual let me click on it go back over to formatting go to General you can come in here and you can kind of put it in the middle make it a little bit bigger there make it bold i w up making the text color similar to match the rest of it right something like that and then I also named it I just said total sales by year by country or by country by year something to that effect and then go with maybe like a 16 there so that was that that is good um there and then there's subtitles and dividers and other things you can do so what I would encourage you to do is click the different things and just see what they do that's how I learn a lot of the feature functionality that exist in here now we're going to go over here and we're going to click on this little magnifying glass here add further analysis to your Visual and so if I click the x constant Line This is going to give me that vertical line that's based on the xaxis not based on the value so this is kind of cool if I say add line right here I can give it a name so that's the first thing that I want to do is go ahead and just give it a name and so let me call this one something like preco again you could call this like I think I call my other one Co you could call this a couple of different things right um depending on what that line represents for you like what was the cut off there I worked with some schools and the schools same thing right they had testing grades that were during Co period period and then they had testing grades after and they wanted to be able to clearly see on the visual the difference well this works for that right this is very very cool and actually you could have two of these lines one at the beginning of that period and one at the end to really kind of shade it out so just think about that this is kind of cool all right so we have that the line I'm going to put the line at two 2006.5 right in the middle of 2000 um of my data here that I have that I'm working with right so I'm going to go with 2006.5 I got a nice little blue line usually made me make that black which with some transparency looks gray right there so that looks pretty good now I'm also going to turn on shading of the area right here and this is kind of nice right uh because it kind of stands out unfortunately I don't love the way that it's doing the shading I'm going to change the color a little bit I'm going to make a little bit more transparent so the shading is still there but it's not as uh dominant right and then down here under data label I'm going to turn on the data label and you'll notice what the data label does is it puts in the value of where this line is and that's not what I want this is cool another real quick little feature for you here if I expand the data label there is a section right here where I can say what I actually want to represent here is the name and you'll remember I called it pre-co that's the name of the line that I created and so I can go in here and make that black you could obviously uh mess around with the the representation of this but that's it right that gives me that now the last part to this we're almost done the last part to this was having those kind of benchmarks or those thresholds that we're going for that we're aiming for right Unfortunately they are constant lines you have a lot of lines here you have average lines you have min max I'm just going to do a basic constant line unfortunately we are currently limited to the fact that we're going to put a value in here so you can do some stuff with conditional formatting here as well but what I'm going to do is I'm just going to kind of hardcode this as a solid value and I'm going to say that my goal in this scenario is going to be somewhere in the 2.5 million range or let's go with 2 million yeah 2.5 million I changed my mind so we're going to go at 2.5 million let me make sure I got the right number of zeros there that looks like too many all right so we're gonna make that line black we're going to leave it dashed we are going to give it a name this is the name that's going to be represented we'll just call it excellent because I don't remember what I put before and again I'm going to go into the data label here and under the data label I'm going to go ahead and tell it that I want to display the name you also have the option of displaying both here but I'm going to do name and then I'm going to change the color of the name to you could always go if it was like really good you wanted to go with like a green because green representative of good you could do something like that right up to you um and then I would normally add another line now you might notice that on this one I actually made it a solid line in my other video and then I made the the kind of average a a dash line you can do that as well so I'm going to add one more line and I'm trying to go through this a little bit quicker here um we'll say average and then data label on for the line we're going to call this one 1 15 one two three we're also going to make this one black or if you want it yeah black solid that's good oh I did it on the line whoops that's okay though that's what I wanted that to be but for the data label I also wanted to make that one black and then again I only wanted to display the name so there it is average so this is it right this is a in just a few minutes here we were able to take that very simple visualization that in my opinion did not represent what the customer really wanted to see cuz they really want to see the individual countries and the growth of those countries by year right or they actually had a different attribute they were working with but that's what they wanted to see but they wanted to be able to see all of them and so I was like let's just use small multiples here I think it's going to be the best representation and then we were able to add in a couple of other things by leveraging this extra feature or the extra features that exist right here and that's it uh a very quick video on visualizations I rarely myself ever do visuals on or or videos on visualizations I usually stick to some of the more um data engineering side of things but I think this is pretty cool I hope you enjoyed the video if you did make sure to hit that like And subscribe button and we'll see you in the next video

Channel: Pragmatic Works

Views: 5,470

Keywords: small multiples, power bi small multiples, power bi, power bi desktop, power bi dashboard, power bi tutorial, power bi data modeling, power bi copilot, power bi training, power bi tutorial for beginners, power bi project, power bi dashboard design, power bi desktop tutorial for beginners, power bi desktop tutorial, power bi interview questions, power bi desktop update, power bi desktop dashboard, pragmatic works, mitchell pearson

Id: Y1Yz3OnurBs

Length: 12min 23sec (743 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 27 2023