- Yooo!
- Yooo! What's up? I'm Adam. - I'm Mara. - And in this video, Mara is gonna show us how
we create beautiful reports. Mara, thank you so much for joining us. For the folks that don't know who you are, tell us a little bit about yourself. - I'm Mara. I used to work at Microsoft, so we were colleagues before
and now ex-colleagues. In the meantime, I kind of went on a solopreneurship journey, and I've set up my own company. And I'm doing now consulting, like online courses and all of that, all related to Power BI
(bell dinging) and more specifically design, because frontend is definitely
my thing. (chuckles) - [Adam] Amazing. And you've got your own
YouTube channel, Data Pears. Definitely go check that out. - Yep.
- All right, Mara, you made a bold statement before we started recording, saying that after you show
what you're gonna show, even someone like me will be able to create beautiful reports, right?
- Hopefully, yes. - Okay. All right. So, okay, where do we start
(upbeat music) with creating those beautiful reports, like for someone that
doesn't know anything about doing this? I just throw a table on a report. What do we do? - Okay, so first of
all, don't throw tables. Please don't do that. Yeah, think properly about what you're supposed to be showing and what are the business goals and what is the goal of that report. If you want a table, I mean, you might as well just use Excel, don't use Power BI in that case. (chuckles)
- Well, but I'm gonna put the
table in the report page so I can export it to Excel. - Uh, no.
(Adam laughing) (Mara laughing) No, you should definitely not do this.
- Okay. - Before we actually start about talking about all the design stuff, just, yeah, be mindful
of what are your goals with that report and what
you should be showing, what kind of insights you should
be showing in that report. And once you do that, then you can start
thinking about the design, the charts that are going
to put in your report and all of that. And that's what I want
to share with you today. - All right, Mara. Enough of all this talking, you know how we like to do it here on "Guy in a Cube." Let's do what?
- Okay. - Let's head over to your machine. - The first thing that
I want to share with you is how do I get ideas for the designs that I create in Power BI. For example, this is
Dribble, and it's amazing. It has like loads of different layouts that you can get inspiration from. This is like very easy to use. You can just search by dashboard, and you can even add like
green or blue or whatever. And then this will give you like a bunch of like ideas for your layouts and even like for color
schemes and everything. The reason I like to go to these websites is because there are a bunch of things that you should consider like the white space or the
space between the visuals. And once you get your ideas from here, it's very, very easy to replicate this either in PowerPoints or Figma, which is the tool that I use. And you have Freepik, which
is pretty much the same thing. And as you can see, very nice layouts and color
schemes and everything so you can totally replicate
some of these elements or even the layouts in your
own reports in Power BI. - All right, Mara, that's amazing. And I love the fact that I don't have to think
about those technicalities of the colors and the
spacing and all that. Like someone already did that hard work, and now I just have to try and replicate that.
- Yeah. One of the other things that I want to mention is those layouts, they have like their color
scheme and everything, and, of course, you probably will have
your own color scheme that you have to use
from your own company. And it's pretty easy to adapt
that, usually those layouts, to whatever color scheme that you need to. So in terms of the colors, if you want to get very creative, you can always use like a
color palette generator. And this will basically
remove the barrier (chuckles) of you having to be creative on your own. And you can just generate the color scheme and then just put all these HEX codes on your report in Power BI. You can customize your theme. And also there is another one that I like. This one actually is my favorite. You can extract themes from an image. So for example, I'm going
to get an image of a report, imagine this one, it's an
example that I took from Dribble. And as you can see, it
gets like all the colors for you.
- Ooh. - I mean, how easy is this?
- Oh my goodness. - And you can just move the thing around, and it'll basically
generate the color palette based on the image. So now you have your color scheme so you have half of the work
done in terms of design. - Mara, that is amazing. I've used that site before, but, yeah, I didn't know. Like that makes it so
easy to get the colors that you want to go after if you've got that theme.
- Yes. - What else do you have for us? So we've got some
layouts, we've got colors. Then what? - Like I said, you have to
build the layout itself, right? - [Adam] Yeah. - You can use something like PowerPoint, but I do use Figma. You can use it to do mock-ups
for like web applications or mobile applications
or Power BI reports. - [Adam] Ah. - So imagine this, I got it from Dribble. I even have here the website. And this was kind of like
the original layout, right, which is not Power BI. But based on this, I managed
(indistinct) like a layout that uses kind of the same concept in terms of design, but in Figma. Again, you can do this in PowerPoint, even though PowerPoint is
probably not as flexible as Figma, I would say. But as you can see, you can
build pretty cool stuff. There is another example. This one looks so nice. I loved it. As you can see, you don't even have to be very creative.
- Wow. It's really the same. (chuckles) And it's not that hard.
(bell dinging) I mean, it might sound a little bit scary, but believe me, it's
not that hard to learn and to start building stuff in Figma. - All right, Mara, that is amazing. I love that you can use those tools. For folks watching though, don't get scared by that, right? As Mara mentioned, you can use PowerPoint. We did a video not too long ago about just using PowerPoint
to create a basic background. And all you're doing,
Mara, just to be clear, is you're creating the background image that you'll use in the report, right?
- Yeah. Once I have everything done in Figma, you can export that
layout as like an image, as an SVG image, and then you just import
it back into Power BI. - Amazing.
- And then basically you just, yeah, have the layout and just build your charts on top of it, format your charts, and, yeah, everything should work
- Amazing, amazing. - And look beautiful. - All right, Mara, that was amazing. So it's given me a lot of ideas of, I'm gonna go play around with
some of those things now. So thank you so much for sharing that. If this topic interests you
and you wanna learn more, go check out this video that Mara did talking about four report
tricks that are gold. Like you need to know them. So go learn more over there
and check out her content. It's amazing. Mara, thank you so much for being with us. As always, I appreciate it. For everyone else, thank
you so much for watching. Keep being awesome, and we'll
see you in the next video.
