1. Making changes
In this demo, we’ll see how to change and edit different Power BI visualizations. Let’s start by taking a look at the data. Notice that the Contoso DataWarehouse tables have been added to the report. These tables contain the fact table Fact Strategy Plan, which contains the actual, budgeted, and forecasted transactions. There are also four dimensional tables, Dim Account, Dim Date, Dim Product Category and Dim Scenario with some more information on the transactions. All of the relationships have been created so there is no need to modify the data model.
As you can see, there are a number of different visualizations used in this Power BI report. On the top left, we have a card with the total amount. Next to that, a donut chart that shows the amount by account type. We can hover on a visualization to show more detail. On the right of the donut chart, the legend is displayed. On the top right, we can see a 100% stacked bar chart. Each account type category makes up 100% and each product category is expressed as a percentage of the total. Below that, we have an area chart. It shows the actual, budgeted, and forecasted amounts for three years. Next to it, we can find a slicer that can be used to filter the data on year. When we select one year, the graph changes to dots, which isn’t ideal. Let’s fix that later. To clear selections you can click on the eraser icon on the top right corner of your visual. Finally, at the bottom of the report, a matrix has been added. It shows a summarized version of the data.
We can change any of the visuals on the page by clicking on the visual to select it, and then clicking on another visualization icon. When you select a visual, you can see what type it is by looking at the little grey box in the Visualizations pane. In this case, an area chart. We saw that selecting one year makes the chart look odd as you only see a dot. Let’s change the visual to a clustered bar chart. We can now see the same data, but represented in a different format and now it looks better when only a single year is selected. If we want to change any of the properties of the chart, such as changing the font size, we can do that by clicking on the formatting icon, which looks like a paintbrush in the visualizations pane. Let’s edit the slicer. Under Slicer settings, then Selection, add a "Select all" option and turn off the Slicer Header. Here, we can also change the size of the values in the Year slicer to a larger font. This can be edited under Values. We’ll resize it from 10 to 12.
Let’s change and format another visual. This time, we are going to change the Matrix to a Table, to show more detail. Let’s edit some of the properties as well. We’ll make the columns wider by hovering over the boundary and dragging it to the right. There we go.
See how easy it was to make edits to visuals. Your turn!
2. Let's practice!