Empower Your Story Telling Data Visualisation in Power BI with Colour Coding

Colour Coding in Power BI

This post has been waiting in my blogging list for a while and now this is my last post in 2019. I wish you all have a wonderful year ahead.

In this post I discuss a very important aspect of data visualisation; Colour Coding. I believe, colour coding is one the most powerful and efficient ways to provide proper information to the users. We learnt as human being that the colour can tell a lot about things. For instance, we look at green grass, if it is light green we immediately understand that the grass is quite fresh and healthy. When she gets a bit yellowish, we know that she’s perhaps thirsty. When it gets brown it is probably too late.

Another perfect example is traffic lights. When it is green, everyone is happy, when it is yellow, everyone is racing to pass the junction, well, I’m just kidding, some people tend to pass the yellow light while everyone knows they have to stop when traffic light is yellow right?? And… when it is red, we have to stop. Enough saying about colour coding and its affects on our lives on a day to day basis. Let’s talk about colour coding in Power BI and quickly get to more exciting stuff.

So… colour coding in Power BI, well, we could colour code from the day first that Power BI born, but, perhaps not in a way that I’m going to explain in this post. Conditional formatting is also around for a while now. In this post I show a technique that we can implement in Power BI to use a consistent colour coding across the whole report.

Here is a report without colour coding:

  Power BI Report without Colour Coding
Power BI Report without Colour Coding

And now look the same report that is colour coded:

 Colour Coded Power BI Report
Colour Coded Power BI Report

Let’s get into it.

Getting Started

In this technique we’ll follow the steps below:

  • We jump online using some awesome free colour palette websites to generate the colours we’d like to use in our reports
  • We copy the HEX values and paste into Power BI (via Enter Data)
  • We define a range of numbers to identify the ranges that our values will fall into. I personally use percentage, but it might be something else in your case
  • We then define some measures to pick a specific colour for the measures we want to colour code
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