A Roundup of Cool new Power BI Visuals Pre January 2020 release

There have been so many awesome new visuals come out that we need to take a moment to have a look at a few using Adventureworks as the example data set.

Advanced Gauge by OKViz

Looking at Year to date and Last Year to Date Measures of Internet Sales and Quantity of Products Bought

We have some DAX to create the following measures for this year to date and Last Year Year to Date

YTD Internet Sales = TOTALYTD(SUM(FactInternetSales[SalesAmount]),DimDate[FullDateAlternateKey].[Date])

YTD Quantity = TOTALYTD(SUM(FactInternetSales[OrderQuantity]),DimDate[FullDateAlternateKey].[Date])

LY YTD Quantity = CALCULATE([YTD Quantity],SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR(DimDate[FullDateAlternateKey].[Date]))

LY YTD Internet Sales = CALCULATE([YTD Internet Sales],SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR(DimDate[FullDateAlternateKey].[Date]))

These would look great in a KPI or two gauges. However, the Advanced Gauge allows you to view them together

Download the visual from the market place.

First of all I’m going to add a Filter for year to the report

The Actual and Target Values for your primary measure is the outer ring and your secondary measures for quantity make up the central ring

You could also add Minimum and Maximum measures if you had them.

This is a really nice visual but at a glance, without the table info it can be quite hard to read and I find the tooltips a little confusing

Once you get a handle on it its clear that we sold more in 2012 than 2011 but we made less money

Straight away, that leaves you wanting to set up analytics to find out why that happened.

Some of the reviews of this visual say it doesn’t work with percentages though which is disappointing

XViz Hierarchy Tree

This is another custom visual to show off your hierarchies

This is very similar to the decomposition tree which is maybe preferable in terms of look and usability. You cant choose the next step down in the tree like you can with the decomposition tree for example

You need ALOT of space for this one

There is already a nice hierarchy for Location data set up. Add Product category to this and analyse by Sales Amount

We are interested in the 20 items against North America so I can click on the end of the node to find out more.

You can see why you need space for this one. There is a bar to allow you to move in and out but its quite hard to control where your visual will end up on the page. I couldn’t get it looking any better than the above visual.

Still, Users will love this because it gives them the ability to interact with the data. Would I choose this over the decomposition tree? Probably not.

It doesn’t look to good when you bring the visual down to size. You would need a full page for this one

X Viz Hierarchical Filter

This visual is a similar one to an old hierarchical filter

This is the new version

And this is the old version

The findings are that if you have multiple hierarchy items in the new version, this visual takes up much more room than the original Hierarchy filter. The preferred choice may be the original one for taking up less space on a page.

And don’t forget, Hierarchical filtering is now available on the Slicer visual that comes with power BI

XViz Bullet Chart

This bullet chart was developed as a replacement for gauges and meters. It saves space and can be either horizontal or vertical.

We have three measures I want to look at by Product Sub Category and I want to be able to slice by Product Category so I can see, for example all the Bikes

YTD Revenue = TOTALYTD(SUM(FactResellerSalesXL_CCI[Sales Amount]),DimDate[FullDateAlternateKey].[Date])

LY YTD Revenue = CALCULATE([YTD Sales],SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR(DimDate[FullDateAlternateKey].[Date]))

2 Years ago YTD Revenue = CALCULATE([YTD Sales],PARALLELPERIOD(DimDate[FullDateAlternateKey].[Date],-24,MONTH))

We wanted to add Year to date for the same period two years ago and for this the PARALLELPRERIOD function can be used. In this case, its looking at 24 months previous to the Date.

Bands have been set within the format, rather than using data

Straight away we can see Jerseys are producing high sales and last year there seemed to be a dip in sales. We are doing much better in the current year

X VIZ Parallel Coordinates

this visual allows you to compare series on a set of numeric variables

Using the previous visuals measures as an example

This immediately shows us that there are 6 product categories leading the way and we are doing much better in the current year than in the last two years.

This visual tells us that we are selling more road frames than road bikes, however we make a lot more money with Road bikes

XVIZ GANTT Chart

In one of our Reporting projects we have a GANTT Chart by MAQ Software

This gives a really nice timeline overview of incidents per location and what the impact is, along with the stage of the incident. This has already been well received, so the question is, how will XVIZ GANTT chart compare?

The MAQ Software visualisation was created by the following fields

Essentially, the MAQ GANTT chart has been re-purposed here for something other than tracking of a project. A brief look at the XVIZ GANTT chart and it would seem like you use it specifically for project tracking.

Therefore you need data items like;

AssignedTo, CompletedDateTime, CreatedDateTime, DueDateTime, PercentCompleted, StartDateTime, TaskName, TaskStatus,TaskOwner etc.

This looks good and if you want to track projects within Power BI over the top of a data source this may be the way to go. However we use Azure DevOps Boards or Jira. the MAQ Software GANTT Chart gives you more options to use the visual for other reasons which is a really good reason to add it to your reports.

Zebra BI Charts

These are really great looking reports. As soon as you try and add any more detail like Category into Group, which would split you report into reports by Group

Annoyingly, you get pointed towards a free trial but I cant find anywhere that openly states what the costs are. Its not even mentioned in the frequently asked questions.

Personally, if there is a cost attached I like the company to be more open about it. Therefore I’m not comfortable with trying the free try. this is a shame and I think Zebra should state the costs before the trial.

Market Place visuals are created by External companies. Always check with your organisational policies that you are happy to use these visuals