DA-100 Microsoft Power BI – Level 2: Formatting our first visualization

1. Formatting font and font size

Now, in the previous video, we created our first visualization, but it doesn’t actually look that good. So what we’re going to do is format it. We’re going to change things like the color and the size and other things. Now, in this visualizations pane, we have got three buttons here, field format and analytics. So they’re buttons or icons. They may look slightly different in your version. For instance, if you have an older version of Power Bi, then this middle paint brush looks a bit like a pen, for example. So while this first icon fields is everything you need to set up your initial visualization, this second one, format, actually makes it look nice.

So let’s click into format. As you can see, we have got several categories of formatting. I’m just going to start off with the third one, grid. So if I expand that by just clicking on it, we can see that there are several different types of properties or formatting that you can do. So whether it’s a vertical grid and you’ll notice that this is a toggle, it’s an on off switch. So to switch it on, you just click onto it and this effect is fairly minimal at this stage anyway. You see a dotted line appear vertically just down there. Similarly horizontal grids, it adds, or in this case, subtracts little lines, but we can hardly see the lines. So what I’m going to do is scroll down to here text size and I’m going to expand. And this makes it actually readable. So now when I do things like the vertical grid, it’s much more likely that you can actually read it. Now, in some applications, like Excel, if there is something that you can’t do, it is grayed out.

For instance, I can’t clear a photo because I haven’t actually engaged applied a photo to start with. In Power Bi, if there’s something you can’t do, it’s simply not shown. So, for instance, this vertical

grid is currently turned off. If I turn it on, an extra option appears between the vertical grid and the horizontal grid and you can see that you can change the color of this line. So maybe if I make it red, make it much more stand out and increase the thickness, you can see what this particular thing, the vertical grid, will do. So if something is switched to off, it may be hiding quite a number of options. So here we can add thickness to the horizontal grid between the lines and you can increase the raw padding. So if it’s too concertinated, if it’s too inwards, then you can just expand it. You’ve got an outline color so you can see that separates the torsos from the data and the data from the headings. And again, an outline weight. So how much weight do you want this line? How thick do you want the line? And at the bottom of each of these little sections, there is a revert to default.

So if you made changes, don’t like them, and you want to go back all the way to where the computer started, click revert to default. If you just want to go back one step, then you can always use the undo, which is up here in the ribbon at the top, so that will just undo a step or so. Unlike Excel, you can’t get a list of all of the things that you can undo and redo. It’s just these little icons that you have to repeatedly click if you want to go back several steps.

Now, part of the reason for showing you the grid at first is because the column headers, the values and the totals are subdivisions of the grid. So the grid affects all three of these, whereas if you want just to affect one of them, then you’d go into the, say the column headers, you’d go into the column headers and change. So suppose I wanted the column headers to have a size 16, that can be done without affecting the rest of the grid.

2. Formatting colors

Now you will see various options. For instance says the font color. So we have an array of 56 different colors. So I mean 60 colors and what these are, these are theme colors and they are colors that are given by the theme, that is either the default theme or theme that you have applied. And so in this case we have a sort of red color here and then we have various colors which are offsets of this. So 20 degree percent lighter, 40% lighter, alternatively 25% darker, 50% darker. So you can select which particular color relating to the theme you want. Alternatively you can click on custom color and custom Color gives you access to the wheel. Now let me explain what the wheel is. Colors are made up of red, green and blue and you can see this particular location. All the way over here is the most red, over here is the most blue and over here is the most green.

So it’s how much intensity, how much of red, green and blue do you add that makes up all of the different colors. So you can see that if they all have the same color to the equal intensity then you’re going to get a white color. So if you wanted red and then start adding blue well this is the maximum amount of red over here and then we start adding blue by going round the color wheel. Similarly, if we started with red and added green that gives us the maximum amount of green, that’s the maximum amount of blue we’ve red and then if you go any further we start subtracting red from it.

So basically find a color that you want on this wheel. It’s got all 16,000 colors that your excel would have and in fact the human eye can can’t even see 16,000 colors. So find what color you want, click on it and you’ll see in this case the column headers have been colored this particular color you can similarly color background colors the same way. Some AP no nice yellow.

Now, if you are familiar with color wheels, if you are familiar as well with hexadecimal then you’ll see at the bottom a hexadecimal calculator that this calculates the amount of red, yellow, I mean green and blue. So in this case maximum red, fairly maximum green and no blue whatsoever. However, that’s fairly complex and if you don’t know hexadesimal then don’t worry about it at all. Going further down we have the opportunity to change the font so you can see the font family. So that is the major font. So maybe I wanted comic Sound for this and you can see what text size you want, what alignment you want, whether it’s left aligned, centered, you can see the region name changing and right aligned and whether there is word wrap on or not.

 And that means that if it wraps, if there is insufficient text, I mean insufficient room for the text in the column, then it can go onto a second line and you’ll see we have identical or fairly identical options for the values and the total. Now, if you want not to format the entirety of this table, but just various aspects, like for instance, the region name, then what you can do is go down to field formatting and you can select which field, which column you want to format. So I might want to have the region name in red with a sort of orange background. You can change the alignment, you can have this font style applied to the header or not and apply to total affects whether the total is similarly colored.

So in this video we’ve had a look at changing the font, changing the font size and changing the colors of visualizations. So you can see that the format icon here we had divided into lots of different categories. Some affect more things than others. The grid affects the entire visualization, but you can narrow it down and affect all of the values or you can narrow it down further and affect just the field formatting. In the next video we’ll have a look at some different types of formatting you can do to this visualization.

3. Stylistic options

Now in this video we’re going to have a look at some options that can add a bit more style to your visualizations. And first of all, we’re going to have a look at the style. Now there’s only one dropdown box in here and this allows for a preset series of styles that can affect things like the grid, column headers, values and so forth that we have looked at in previous videos. So let’s just have a look at some of of these styles. So none just gives you a really standard style, but you’ll notice that all of the visualizations that we have previously put on, for example, the size 13 and the background and foreground characters are overriding this style. Now minimal, so you can see the difference between non and minimal. It’s got a little bit of color in the dividing lines and it’s slightly spaced out. So if I just go into the field formatting for region name and just revert to format.

So here you can see difference between non and minimal. Bold header is minimal but it just colors the header. And again, if you don’t like that particular color you can go into column headers and just change it alternating rows. So here you can see that every other row. So the second, the fourth, the 6th rows have got an alternating background. And again you can edit that by going into the values and you’ll see not just a font color and a background color as we have with the column headers and the totals, but also an alternate front color, forecolor and a back color. So maybe I wanted the back color to be blue or perhaps a bit lighter than that. 60% lighter?

No, I wanted even lighter maybe. So let’s just find a suitable color. There we go. Contrasting alternating roles just gives you the alternating rods but with a black background for the first, third and fifth flatty rolls. Well, that’s sort of what I was trying to do in the previous video. It’s in the previous visualization. So we have a blue, but then a darker blue, maybe a bit of a green. And again you can have that with flasher headers as well. Sparse just gives you a really black and white layout. So you can see the difference between minimal and sparse, for instance. And then condensed you can see the difference between that. And none is just the top and the bottom, but that gives you a certain amount of style that you could be starting with. So if you’re unsure how much color to add in, you might want to have a look at these and go, what might look good?

I wouldn’t advise adding huge amounts of colors to everything you’re doing. Just enough to make it stand out a bit but not put people off. So, in addition to style going further down, we also have got Title. So if I open up Title you can see nothing’s enabled and that’s of course it’s switched off. But if I switch this on I can put in a title, a header right at the beginning. So sales volume per region name and you can see that right at the top. Very small text, too small for me.

So I’m going to center align it, I’m going to increase the font size and I’m going to have a background and a strong foreground and I’ll probably change the font as well. So that just gives me a bit of an emphasis as to what we are looking for here. Similarly, there is a background tab available and the background tab just allows you to set an overall background. So if I go back to the style and change this to minimalistic then if I go to the background I can change it so that it has a little yellow background but you can hardly see the yellow background. That’s because the rest of the background is not translucent, it’s white. And so what I really want is a no background for all of the white colors that I’ve got. But unfortunately if you go to grid you’ll find that you can’t choose a no color like you can in Excel. You have to choose a color even if that color is white. So this background probably not so useful for tables, probably more useful for other visualization. Like if I go into a pie chart you can see the visualization there may work quite nicely with a yellow background but here it just gives a yellow outline. Then there is a border. So if I just switch the background off so this is a border around the text, so it may be a red border and there we can see we’ve got a red border with a bit of a curve at the corners. So you can turn that curve on or off basically with the radius setting so that’s with it off.

But if I add the radius that will give a curve around the edges which could be quite appealing depending on what you’ve got. And then finally we’ve got a tool tip at the bottom. So this is just text which is shown when you hover over the visualization. So these are some of the stylistic formatting that you can do not just with tables but with other visualizations as well. So you can have a choice of default styles, you can add on titles and format them, you can add backgrounds, they’re probably not that good of tables and you can add borders and have them slightly curved. Now you’ll notice that this visualization doesn’t quite fit the space that we’ve given it and we’ll solve that in the next video.

4. 8g. Position visuals

Now in this video we’re going to have a look at resizing visualizations. So you can see this particular visualization because of everything that we have done like the border and spacing things out. It’s too small for the container that it’s in so we need to resize the container or resize the column. Thankfully both are very easy. If you just go in between the columns you can see that the mouse changes to this double headed pointer. When it’s like this you can just click and drag to change the width of the column. Now you notice that Greater Manchester is now on two lines. It’s still in the same row but it’s on two lines and the reason for that is because Word wrap has been enabled. If I scroll down to the values, open it and click see word wrap you can see it is on. If it was off then you would have this towards the end of the column indicating that there is more to see.

So the question is do you want to spend more space on rows or do you want to potentially not show the entirety of the data in your columns? Now if you can do that with individual columns you can also do that with visualizations. So if you click on the visualization you can see that there are these eight little pointers all around these markers are where you can drag the visualization. So you can drag it so that you resize it further down or further across or further down on the cross if you want. So I’m giving it a bit more width and now I can resize the column so that there is no word wrapping required and then I’ll resize it so that it’s a lot tighter. Now if you want to move the visualization then hover over any of these bits which are not these markers.

Now in other programs such as Excel you might expect that the arrow changes to a hand. Well here it doesn’t. It still remains a mouse. And now I can just drag the entirety of the visualization to any of a point on this page. Now you can also adjust the location in the formatting. Right at the top we have a general tab, a general selection that we haven’t got into. And you can see we’ve got the X position, that’s a horizontal position and the Y position. So I could have an exposition of ten that will move it slightly further to the left or 100 or 1000 is too big for this particular page so 500. Similarly I can change the X position so move it right at the top left. To do that I’ll have the X position zero, the Y position is zero. So no need to drag it and see if you can get it to top left fairly easily but no need to even approximate it. You could just have zero and zero. Similarly you can change the width and the height. Just finishing off this section. There’s also something called alt text. So this is used by people who have got certain disabilities that prevent them from reading what’s on the screen. So if I put this is my sales volume per region name, then whatever software accessibility software they are using, when they have a look at this Power Bi, they’ll be able to see, or more accurately here, this is my sales volume per region name. What I’m going to do next is I’m going to copy this visualization. Now, I can do this in a few ways. First of all, I can go to the ribbon. Now you can’t see the ribbon. I’ve turned it temporarily off. So I’m going to turn it back on by clicking on this drop down next to it. And if I want to remove the ribbon, I can do so by just clicking it again. So I’m going to copy and again, I can go to Home Copy or I can press CTRL and C for copy. So when you’ve done that, I can paste.

Now that pastes the entire visualization. And to paste, you either press CTRL and V or you click on Home Paste. Now I can drag it around just like any other visualization. But notice it tries to align it with a few locations. So you can see this dotted red line down the middle of the page. So it’s trying to left a line to the middle of the page. Alternatively, I can try and get it center aligned to the middle of the page or right aligned, but it will also align with other visualizations.

So if I just move it up, you’ll see that now it is both top and bottom aligned with both visualizations are at the same top and the same height. Similarly, I can have them so that one is directly on underneath another. So that’s quite good if you literally were having one underneath each other. And here we got them literally one underneath each other and at the same left and the same right. Now it is possible to overlap two visualizations and I’ll see how we can work through this bit better in the next video.