Thursday, June 29, 2017

How do you format a chart in Power BI?

Customers are used to eye candy as most of social media strive to provide. While working with data it is not just eye-candy effects that are the driving force for visualization but controls available to bring out the features of data like its value representation; what it represents; relative magnitiudes; values of each piece of data, etc. Power BI can do a lot of this with simple choices. It is pretty find grained.

Take for example this mundane bar chart of some values in a chart of two axes. It shows a 'bar graph' and the default formatting if any are barely visible.


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The formatting icon is where you click and start.


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Right now only X-axis, Y-axis and Title are turned all on but you can hardly see any details. Using the drop-down you can control the Data colors; Data labels, background, border and lock aspect (locking the aspect ratio of the chart).

Presently the default color of all the six X-axis values are 'Green'.


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However you can individually color them if there is a need. For this you need to turn on 'Show all'.


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This image shows each data with a different color. You cal also go to default if you do not like. These changes in formatting renders the visualization as shown which is immediate.



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You can also change the title which is barely visible clicking on 'Title' .


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These changes in formatting renders the visualization as shown which is immediate.



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You can turn on the Data lables turning 'Off' to 'On' by pulling the slider to right.
You will notice that the letters are too small to read (see above image).


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You can work all the controls under Data Labels and make it look better as shown. If you click X-Axis or Y-axis then you can modify the formatting as swell.




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If you have a saved image or logo or any background image you can add as shown and set its transparency as shown.



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Similarly you can set the backgorund color and its tranpareancy as well.


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In the 'General' section you can set the settings shown.


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