This article will explain basic design formatting for content, card, and scatter plot in Power BI and how to use those to make attractive reports and dashboards with recent market trends. It demonstrates straightforward steps to get started with Power BI desktop for those who have a passion to learn Business Intelligence tools.
In the previous chapter, we completed the pie and column bar designs.
This part will be continued from there. In this part, we will learn to add Title, background, border design, data labels show in visualization as well as understand how to add scatter plots and cards in the dashboard. In addition to this, I will explain shortly about DAX functions and demonstrate how to use them.
Insert a Text box and give the name of your Dashboard and put it on top of the page. Format it as per your design needs.
Page Background
Go to Format then go to Page color and then choose a background color.
Border Design
Borders add good looking to design in the dashboard. To add a border on visuals-> select visuals in which you want to add a border. Then go to format, turn on Border and choose the color of the border and give the radius of the border.
Data Labels show in visualization
Visual with data displayed in it provides clear insights to the user. To show data in visual, select visuals and go to format. Then go to Data labels and turn it on.
Scatter Plot
Scatter Plot is a type of visualization which is used to represent the relationship between two numerical values. In the scatter plot, bubble point represents the data and the shape of the bubble can be changed according to your choice.
How to add a Scatter Plot?
Go to the visualization panel and select scatter plot as depicted in the below figure.
Drag Branch column to X-Axis and Id to Y-Axis, as depicted below.
Then rename the Y-Axis to Number of Employees.
or...
We can go to the Format section and rename the Title of the Scatter plot, as shown below.
Visualization color-changing – Data color changing
To change the color of data represented in visualization, go to Format then go to Data colors and choose your favorite color or color according to your customer's needs.
To increase the size of the scatter plot bubble shape: Go to Format, then go to shape and increase the size of your shape
Additionally, you can change the shape of the marker by selecting from the dropdown options.
Card
In Power BI, a Score Card is generally used to represent the total number of records or total count of any field or total count of some filtered value or sum of Amount, total sales amount, total price, the amount by departments, and so on. Based on our needs, we can represent, count, summation, aggregate value, etc. in Score Card. Usually, the designer is placed on top of reports and the dashboard to make it more attractive and eye catching.
Follow the below steps to add and design the card.
Go to Visualizations and click Card.
Then drag the column which you want to show on the card. In my case, I want to show the total number of employees in an organization, so I am going to drag ID to Field.
After that, rename the field as Total number of Employee. We can design and format the scorecard background, font, and so on from the format section.
Alternatively, we can use the DAX function to get the Total count of Employees and the number of employees in each Branch. Data Analysis Expression (DAX) consists of a library of functions and operators which can be used to build formulas and expression in Power BI.
In this example, we can create a measure or quick measure with DAX functions and get the total number of employees in an organization as well as the number of employees in each branch.
Right-click on your Dataset and click on New Measure to add it.
Write the below expression in your measure, as depicted on the below screen.
- Total Count = CALCULATE(COUNT(DatasetName[Id]))
Our database Name is Employee. So in this case, our Measure becomes like this:
- Total Count = CALCULATE(COUNT(Employee[Id]))
After writing the DAX function click on the correct icon, as depicted below:
To Add the above Measure Value to your Scorecard, click on the card and drag the value, as shown below:
To get the number of Employees in each branch: There are two ways:
- Add Card and Drag Id in the field and in Filter option we can bring Branch Column and Choose one Branch Name.
- Add New Measure for each Branch as illustrated below.
- Total Pokhara Count= CALCULATE(COUNT(Employee[Id]), FILTER(Employee, Employee [BranchName]="Pokhara"))
To show this New Measure Value in the scorecard just drag and drop it in the Field Value of Score, as described above.
Similarly, repeat the process of adding a new measure to count employee numbers in another branch. Design the scorecard in the remaining branch.
Eventually, we have designed an employee dashboard, as depicted below.
Conclusion
This article has described the basic designs and formatting layout for dashboard and reports in Power BI. Additionally, the article has explained steps to add scatter plots and cards with an example using Power BI Desktop. I hope, this will help the reader to understand the basics of how to use the Power BI desktop and start designing reports and dashboards with scatter plots and cards, as well as basic DAX functions.