Today Microsoft released Power BI Desktop March 2020 which I was hoping that it includes a simple feature on Matrix visual to be able to sort the Martix by column in descending order, but, it doesn’t. So, in this post I quickly show you how to sort Matrix by column in descending order.
Here is the scenario. One of my customers is building a report in Power BI showing sales by Year, Month and Day of Week in a Matrix as below.
Sorting Matrix Visual in Power BI
Everything looks fine! But looking at the Matrix sorting quickly reveals that such feature is NOT available (YET). But the customer would like to see the Matrix sorted by Year in descending order, something like this.
Sorting Matrix by Column Headers in Descending Order
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
And now look the same report that is colour coded:
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
In this post I show you a very quick trick to format Line Chart and Area Chart conditionally in Power BI. As this is a “Quick Tip” I’m going to keep this post really short.
One of my customers asked me to show time series in line charts and area charts. But she want’s it to be conditionally formatted based on the average value over time. Let’s keep it simple, she wants to show “Sales by Year Month” in line chart, but, highlight the data points that are below “Average Sales per Year Month”. As you may know, we currently do not have the luxury of formatting line charts and area charts. But wait, this post is all about that. Let’s dig into it.
From the above scenario, you perhaps already guessed that we need to create a measure which defines the colour based on “Average Sales per Year Month” to be able to format the chart conditionally. If any data point is below the “Average Sales per Year Month” then we highlight it in Orange, if it is above the “Average Sales per Year Month” then we stick to the default colour.
When you work on real-world projects in power BI, you would probably have different environments Like DEV, UAT, Pre-Prod and Prod. It is important for you and your audience to know what the data is coming from. Am I looking at Dev or UAT data or I am actually looking at real data in Production environment. You may have asked or been asked with a question like “Where the data is coming from?”. It is important to know how trustworthy the data you’re analysing is. In this post I show you an easy way to show the environment your Power BI report is connected to.
How It Works
To display the environment name you use query parameters, then you reference that parameter, turn it to a table and add columns to show the environments accordingly. Easy right?
Depending on your scenario the implementation might be slightly different, but the principals are the same. In this post I use a SQL server database. Therefore I need to Parameterise server name. in real world you may also need to parameterise the database name. Again, if your case is quite different, like if you get data from Excel, then the Excel path can be different for different environments. Let’s dig-in.
Open Query Editor
Click “Manage Parameters”
Click “New”
Enter “Name” and “description”
Tick “Required”
Select “Text” in “Type”
Select “List of values” in “Suggested Values” and type in server names for different environments
pick a “Default Value” and “Current Value”
Click OK
So far you created a new parameter that can be used to get data from a SQL Server data source.The next steps show you how to use that parameter to show the environments in your reports.
