Power BI Visuals

What are Power BI Visuals?

For the visualization of data there are some inbuilt visuals in Power Bi and some custom visuals as well. Custom visuals are user-defined where user can use own creativity to how to present a data, for example, we can use lines and dots in a flashing and floating manner to display the changes in the data in certain period of time.

Power BI visuals are the type of charts, graphs, tables, cards, etc available with Power BI to visualize our data.

In this Power BI visualization box we can see “Stacked Bar Chart, Stacked Column Chart, Clustered Column Chart, Clustered Bar Chart, 100% Stacked Bar Chart, 100% Stacked Column Chart, Line Chart, Area Chart, Stacked Area Chart, Line & Stacked Column Chart, Line & Clustered Column Chart, Ribbon Chart, Waterfall Chart, Scatter Chart, Pie Chart, Donut Chart, Treemap, Map, Filled Map, Funnel Chart, Gauge Chart, Card, Multi-row Card, KPI, Slicer, Table, Matrix, etc

Now we will see how to use some of these visuals and format the same for better visualization.

You can download the excel data from below to use the same for building visuals. It is better if you can download and practice along with us as we show them.

How to Create Custom Visuals in Power BI?

I have already uploaded the data from excel to Power BI and it looks like this as of now.

Now the first Power bi visual we will practice is “Cards”.

Visual #1 – Cards

Cards are there to showcase the selected column numbers. Now we will show how many responses are there in this employment survey.

For this first choose “CARD” visual.

Now from fields choose the “Row” column to get the total responses.

Since the cards are the current selection we can easily see the numbers on the card, but the moment you unselect the card this is how it looks like.

In this we don’t see that there is card visual for this, so now we need to design this visualization for the betterment of presentation.

• First, we will add heading for this card because as of now we don’t see any heading for this card. Select the card and go to the formatting section.

• In this section click on “Format” to see all the formatting options.

• Since we need to add “Title” to the card, click on “Title” option. Under this enter the “Title” of the card as “Total Responses”, font color as “Black”, background color as “Pink”, alignment as “Center”, Text Size as 20, font family as “Verdana”.

Now we will have card heading like the below one.

• Since we have added “Title” to the card make “Category Label” as “Off”.

• Now choose background option and fill the color as identical as title background color and make the transparency as 50%.

• Now apply “Border” to the card as shown below.

Visual #2  – Donut Chart

As we all know how to create a Donut chart in excel, but this time in Power BI visuals you need not break your sweat, so for the data of “Education and their respective salaries,” we will create a “Donut” chart.

• Select Donut Chart first.

• Now from the filed column click on “Education” and “Salary USD” to create a donut chart.

Similarly, we need to play around with this chart to make it look beautiful.

• Add Border to the chart as shown below.

• Now add background color as shown below.

• You can change the “Title” of the chart and make formatting as shown below.

• Switch Off “Data Labels”

• Add “Legends”.

• For “Legend” do below formatting to make it look beautiful.

If you wish to play around with the inner circle size of the donut chart, you can do this under “Shapes”.

• If the inner circle is zero it will look like “Pie” Chart.

Like this, you can increase or decrease the size of the inner circle to fit in your needs.

Visual #3 – Table

Using Table visual we can create a summary table, for example if you want to create a summary of “Job Title” wise number of responses choose “Table” from visuals.

Now from fields choose “Job Title” and “Rows” to create a table like this.

Add Title to the chart as “Job Title-wise Responses Summary” and design the heading.

Like this, we can create a power Bi visualizations to design the dashboards.

Things to Remember

• Based on the data you can design your visuals.
• You can insert custom visualization in power bi as well.
• For all the visuals formatting is an important technique, you need to learn formatting methods to add value to your dashboard.

Recommended Articles

This is a guide to Power BI Visuals. Here we learn how to create custom visuals with microsoft power bi along with examples of Cards, Donut Charts & Tables, etc. You can learn more about data visualization from the following articles –

• Power BI Date Formatting
• Steps to Create a Power BI Report
• Power BI Tutorial
• Course on Excel for Power User