From where this idea?
Lately, I am experiencing other data visualization tools and having a long history with Excel and Microsoft I have decided to look into Power BI.
Currently, I am not able yet to express any opinion about Power BI … but shortly … I find it user-friendly and quite similar with what can you do in Excel (definitely at a larger scale).
And DAX it looks similar with what I have experienced before, but even though it gets complicated when you try more difficult syntax or logic.
Anyway, if you are curious about this you can have a look over the list of functions published on the Microsoft web page. See the link here.
Or I can recommend you the below video for a smooth start:
Why KPI cards?
Firstly, this is how it looks a KPI card and what can we expect from it:
- in the background is an area chart
- the big number in front represents the actual figure (i.e. the actual sales)
- and at the bottom is the goal
With a single button, you can obtain that in Power BI and I said: “well, that’s simple… so, I should try this in Tableau”.
… and 3 hours later I came with a pretty cool version of that.
What I learned from this
- I like this KPI visual, as it embeds a lot of information and it takes just a second to read it;
- The fact that in Tableau it takes longer than in Power BI is a key factor why I will not use it too much;
- I will try to develop a template that takes me less time to build one in the future.
In order to obtain that visual, I used an area chart combined with a text table:
- I have placed my text over the month at the middle point (month 6, in my case)
- I reduced the second axis at the half where I had less text.
- I used some LoD functions in order to obtain the right numbers there (sales, dummy target, achievement percentage)
- I have placed at the bottom a sparkline chart because it combines perfectly a table with a line chart. Please see my article about it.
Please download the version of the report and browse it in order to see my logic.
