A Power BI dashboard is usually known as a canvas and it can have only one page to tell a story using visualizations. Since it is restricted to one page, a perfect dashboard contains only the most important fundamentals of the story.
A dashboard is not only attractive but also very interactive and highly customizable. The tiles update as the primary data changes.
Dashboards are a delightful way to monitor your business, to look for responses, and to see your most-important metrics at one view. The visuals on a dashboard can come from one or many data sets and it can also come from one or many reports. A dashboard combines on-premises and cloud data, providing a combined view regardless of where the data lies.
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Power BI Data Insights – Power BI Dashboard
The use of Power BI dashboard can be best understood with an example where the data set has different data types, each of which has the potential to reveal valuable business insights. Let us consider a use-case of different business segments where you unlock insights from data around product categories, customer segments, sales figures, and profit.
In order to achieve insights for above-mentioned facts, you will be required to process data in a different way. The goal is to enhance business productivity & profitability. Let’s now try to understand what insights we can get using the Sales data set.
1. OVERALL SALES AND PROFITS
The first thing to do is to get an idea of the performance of the business over time. For this, we need data around sales from different regions over a quarterly basis. We should also know which quarter is more profitable or loss-making compared to other quarters.
2. PROFIT BASED ON DIFFERENT PRODUCTS
After getting year-wise insights on profits and losses, we can create a scatter-plot visual of sales and profit at the product level with profit and sales as X and Y-axis respectively. These situations can be mapped to understand different scenarios.
For example, a business can make a decision to invest more in a particular product that has lesser sales but higher profits. On the other hand, there can also be a situation where sales of a product are higher but profits are declining.
3. THE PERFORMANCE OF DIFFERENT CUSTOMER SEGMENTS
It is also important for the business to know which customer segment is driving sales and profits in different regions or countries. For instance, a pie chart with a view of customer segments and sales & profits can help the business visualize future strategies– which segment should be the main focus area like Mid-market segment might be driving the maximum profit with very fewer sales number.
4. REVENUE GENERATION BY REGION
Within the regions or countries, we can get to know how much profit is earned by doing a particular amount of sales. For instance, if Canada is yielding better profits than Mexico, then there is no harm in increasing sales in Canada.
Therefore, let us go further to see if we can visualize this data better using Power BI dashboard. But first, we need to create a Power BI report with all the visualizations to pin them on the dashboard.
4 Steps to Creating Power BI Visuals
- Import data sets into Microsoft Power BI. To import data sets, click on the Get Data
- After you import the data set, the interface will give you an option to load or edit the data.
- Now, select the visualizations and drag the required fields and drop them on visualization template to view them. As shown in the image below, we have selected a map representation and have dragged the Country field and Profit field and dropped it on the map.
Data Analytics Tricks in Power BI – Guidebook
You too can analyze data like a Data Scientist. No coding needed. No statistics needed.
Analyze & Visualize data using Power BI. (23 tricks in one book)
So, let us understand the concept with our use case and try and visualize data as discussed above.
As shown in the image above, the map representation uses ‘Country’ and ‘Profit’ fields as inputs. The visualization gives us the country-wise ‘profit leaders’, which are represented by bigger bubbles. The bigger the bubble, the higher the profit of that country. In this way, you can easily identify the profits made in each country using map visualization than creating a Power BI Dashboard.
You can go ahead and save this visualization or even publish it there itself. But the convenient way is to create individual visualizations on new pages and then publish the entire report. This will help to pin these visualizations to the Power BI dashboard and also avoid crowding of a single page with multiple visualizations. To add a new page just click on the plus sign on the left-hand side at the bottom of the screen.
1. Overall Sales and Profits of Power BI Visuals
- To know the overall Sales and Profit, you need to select a line graph from the visualizations pane
- After that drag the ‘profits’, ‘sales’ and ‘date’ fields into the visualization template
- Once the visualization is created, change the representation’s timeline from ‘yearly’ to ‘quarterly’ which can be done by clicking on the navigation available on the top right corner of the screen. Find the image below for the same.
It is visible in the above image that the sales have gone up after the third quarter. These visualizations are collaborative. If you hover the mouse pointer on the graph, it will display stats as shown in the image above.
2. Profit based on different products of Power BI Visuals
- To know the Profit made by different products, you need to select a scatter plot visual from the visualizations pane
- After that drag the ‘profits’, ‘sales’ and ‘Product’ fields into the visualization template
- In this visualization, you can see a scatter-plot with X-axis as Profit and Y-axis as Sales. Also, you can see Product as an aggregate for both sales and profit axis. This visualization can help us divide the product into three business strategic focus areas like Retain, Develop and Divest. The product on the top right corner with high sales and profit are currently at a good position and business would want to retain this in the coming future. Product to the right of the median line can be looked upon as opportunity by the business wherein the increase in sales would help to increase the business profits which is called Develop strategy. And lastly, the products with low sales and low profits or higher sales but low profits are obviously not the areas where the business should focus on divesting the money. This helps deeply in calculating business investment strategy. The image below shows the scatter-plot visualization.
3. Performance of different customer segments of Power BI Visuals
- To know the performance of different customer segments, you need to select a pie chart from the visualizations pane
- After that drag the ‘profits’, ‘segment’ and ‘country’ fields into the visualization templates
With visibility at a region level, we can now recognize which consumer segment is driving the sales and profits and identify which segment to focus on among Government, Midmarket, Enterprise, Channel Partners and small business.
As shown in the below image, we can see that in France, the Government segment has the highest number of sales and profit then other sectors. Whereas, the Midmarket segment has the lowest profit share with lower sales contribution in France. Definitely, the business should focus on increasing the Midmarket sales contribution which can impact the profitability for the business.
4. Revenue Generation by Region of Power BI Visuals
- To know the overall Sales and Profit, you need to select a line graph from the visualizations pane
- After that drag the ‘profits’, ‘sales’ and ‘date’ fields into the visualization template.
- Once the visualization is created, change the representation’s timeline from ‘yearly’ to ‘quarterly’ which can be done by clicking on the navigation available on the top right corner of the screen. Find the image below for the same.
The next logical step is to derive insights for the region to visualize sales and profit. We can understand which region has higher sales and profits. Or how the various regions have performed in terms of sales and profits. In Power BI, you can add multiple filters to your data to get the exact insight you want.
You can click on the drill-down option available on the top left corner of the visualization to alter the representation of data. The image below shows the total number of sales done in each country and profits derived from it.
5 Steps to Creating Power BI Dashboard
1. After creating all the Power BI visuals, you need to save them as a Power BI file to create a Power BI dashboard. The first step is to save the visuals as a report as shown in the image below.
2. Once you have saved the file, you should move ahead to publish your report. The Publish option is available on the top right corner of the screen as shown in the image below.
3. Once you have published the file, you will get a pop up with a link. When you click on the link, it will take you to a webpage with your report published to the web. The image below shows a published report.
4. You can pin visuals from your report to a Power BI dashboard. First, you need to select a visual. Once you have done that you click on the pin visual symbol to pin the visual to your dashboard.
5. Once you click on the pin visual option, the following tab will open. You can pin the visual to an existing dashboard or can create a new dashboard.
6. Finally, add all the visuals you have created to the dashboard. You can resize and adjust the visuals on the dashboard to meet your requirements.
Data Analytics Tricks in Power BI – Guidebook
You too can analyze data like a Data Scientist. No coding needed. No statistics needed.
Analyze & Visualize data using Power BI. (23 tricks in one book)