Top Power BI Visuals You Should Be Using
Power BI is packed with a wide range of visualization options, each designed to help you present your data in the most impactful way. While many users are familiar with the basic visuals like bar charts, pie charts, and line graphs, there are several lesser-known yet powerful visuals that can take your reports to the next level. In this blog post, we’ll explore some of the top Power BI visuals you should be using, but probably aren’t—visuals that can enhance your reports by providing deeper insights and improving data interpretation.
1. Decomposition Tree
Why You Should Use It: The Decomposition Tree is a highly interactive visual that allows you to break down a measure by its contributing factors, providing insights into the root causes behind your data. This visual is particularly useful for identifying patterns, understanding relationships, and conducting root cause analysis.
What It Offers:
Drill down into different dimensions to see how they contribute to the overall value.
Automatically suggests the most significant factors, helping you focus on what matters most.
Ideal for performance analysis, variance analysis, and scenario exploration.
2. Key Influencers
Why You Should Use It: The Key Influencers visual leverages machine learning to help you understand the factors that are driving a specific outcome in your data. It’s particularly valuable for identifying key drivers behind trends or variations, allowing you to make data-driven decisions with confidence.
What It Offers:
Analyzes data to reveal the top factors that influence a particular metric or outcome.
Helps you identify patterns and correlations that might not be immediately obvious.
Useful for customer behavior analysis, sales performance analysis, and risk assessment.
3. Ribbon Chart
Why You Should Use It: The Ribbon Chart is a unique visual that shows changes in rank for different categories over time. It’s an excellent tool for visualizing trends and comparisons, especially when you want to track the relative performance of categories across different time periods.
What It Offers:
Visualizes the movement of categories (e.g., product rankings, market share) across time.
Highlights the dominant categories with ribbons that change width based on value.
Great for competitive analysis, market share analysis, and performance ranking.
4. Matrix Visual with Conditional Formatting
Why You Should Use It: The Matrix visual is often underutilized, but it becomes incredibly powerful when combined with conditional formatting. This allows you to create dynamic, color-coded tables that highlight key metrics and trends, making it easier for users to spot important data points at a glance.
What It Offers:
Display data in a pivot-table-like format with rows and columns.
Apply conditional formatting to emphasize trends, outliers, or key performance indicators.
Ideal for financial reporting, sales performance tracking, and variance analysis.
5. Bullet Chart
Why You Should Use It: The Bullet Chart is a simple yet effective visual for comparing a measure against a target. It provides a clear and concise way to display progress towards goals, making it a valuable tool for performance tracking and dashboard reporting.
What It Offers:
Visualizes actual performance against target benchmarks in a single compact view.
Easily customizable to display ranges, such as poor, satisfactory, and good performance.
Perfect for KPI dashboards, goal tracking, and performance monitoring.
6. Waterfall Chart
Why You Should Use It: The Waterfall Chart is ideal for visualizing how different components contribute to the total value of a measure. It’s particularly useful for understanding cumulative effects, such as changes in revenue or expenses over time.
What It Offers:
Breaks down the cumulative effect of sequential positive and negative values.
Clearly shows how individual elements contribute to the overall total.
Great for financial analysis, profit and loss analysis, and expense tracking.
7. Sankey Diagram
Why You Should Use It: The Sankey Diagram is a powerful visual for showing the flow of data between different categories. It’s especially useful for visualizing relationships and distributions within complex datasets, making it easier to understand how different segments are connected.
What It Offers:
Displays the flow and distribution of values across multiple categories.
Visualizes relationships and processes in a clear, intuitive manner.
Excellent for process analysis, customer journey mapping, and energy flow analysis.
8. Tree Map
Why You Should Use It: The Tree Map visual is great for displaying hierarchical data in a compact space. It allows you to see the relative size of categories at a glance, making it easy to compare parts of a whole within your data.
What It Offers:
Displays hierarchical data as nested rectangles, with area size representing value.
Quickly highlights the largest or most significant categories within a dataset.
Useful for sales analysis, portfolio analysis, and resource allocation.
9. Scatter Chart with Play Axis
Why You Should Use It: The Scatter Chart with Play Axis adds a temporal dimension to your scatter plots, allowing you to visualize how data points evolve over time. It’s an engaging way to show trends, patterns, and correlations in dynamic datasets.
What It Offers:
Animates data points over time, revealing trends and movements in the data.
Helps identify correlations, clusters, and outliers in dynamic datasets.
Ideal for trend analysis, market analysis, and economic forecasting.
10. Chiclet Slicer
Why You Should Use It: The Chiclet Slicer is a more advanced version of the standard slicer, offering additional customization options. It’s a versatile tool that can improve the interactivity of your reports by providing users with a visually appealing way to filter data.
What It Offers:
Allows you to customize the appearance of slicers with images, buttons, or colored tiles.
Enhances the user experience by making data filtering more intuitive and visually engaging.
Suitable for interactive dashboards, product catalogs, and category-based filtering.
Conclusion
While the basic visuals in Power BI are powerful in their own right, exploring and incorporating these lesser-known visuals can significantly enhance your reports and dashboards. From the Decomposition Tree’s root cause analysis capabilities to the dynamic animations of the Scatter Chart with Play Axis, these visuals provide deeper insights and improve the overall user experience.
By integrating these visuals into your Power BI reports, you can unlock new ways to interpret your data, present complex information more clearly, and drive better decision-making within your organization. Don’t limit yourself to the standard options—experiment with these powerful visuals and discover how they can elevate your Power BI reports to new heights.
