PL-300 – Section 5: Part 1 Level 4: Adding more control to your visualizations Part 5

50. Buttons and Actions

Now, when you drill through, you are going from one page to another, and it’d be nice if you were able to go back to where you came from and you can do. There is a back button that gets added as part of the drill through. And if I click on this back button, you can see Ctrl and click here goes back to the previous page, and do that. We get back to our original page, but what if you wanted to make the option more explicit?

Well, we can use buttons. Now, buttons along with other things that we have previously inserted, can be used as little indicators on how to navigate. So, if I click on the left arrow button, you can see we have a much thicker, more prominent left button here. So, now, if I drill through, you can see there it is. And if I Ctrl and click, nothing happens.

After all, it’s only a button. I’ve not programmed it to do anything. It looks like a left arrow button, but I haven’t said go back to the previous page and that’s where we can go to the visualisation pane, Action. So, if I put Action from off to on, you can see that there are back, bookmark, Q&A and web URL. So, if I go back or if I say, “Back,” let’s see what happens now, if I go through this drill through. So, Ctrl and click here to go back to the previous page, it lets me go back.

Now, you might be thinking, is that really this little button? Or is it what’s underneath it? Well, I’m going to move it to one side.

So, let’s try this again, drill through, hover over this and you can see it offers me Ctrl and click here. Now, we don’t just have to use button for this, although there are some nice predefined buttons.

We can also use images and shapes. So, these, again, if I just insert a random image, and a random shape, you’ll see that they too have an action with the same options back, bookmark, Q&A and web URL. So, whichever of these you use, whatever it is, it needs to be friendly. It needs to be user friendly, so that the end user knows it’s meant to happen. So, don’t just insert a random shape and assume that people will get it. You can add some text to your buttons. So, if I click a button text on, we can say go back. So, that is even more of a clue. You can switch the icon off if you so wish, though obviously don’t switch it off and have no text, otherwise it will literally be invisible. But you can change the shape of it if you so wish, from the icon section and also the horizontal and vertical alignment and line colour. So, you can have a nice red arrow with a deeper weight, if you so wished.

So, let’s go back to my presentation. I was doing various bookmarks, if you remember, from an earlier video. So now I can add little icons to allow me to go onto these different bookmarks without having to open up the bookmark pane. So, if I just put in a series of small rectangles, these could be images, say 1, 2, 3 and that sort of thing.

And, in fact, another way of doing this is by putting on a button, dragging this across, adding some text and then removing the icon. So, as long as you’ve formatted the text correctly, that’s a never way of doing it. But I’m just going to largely stick to the images, the shapes for now, though, as I say, I would probably more likely be using an image. At least, I can stylize those a bit easier.

And now what I can do is select an Action for this first one and say, I want to show the bookmark overall and then the next one, I want to show the bookmark 2000 to 2009. Next one, I’m going to show a different bookmark, and so on. So, now in my presentation, I can just Ctrl and click that is to say, click, click, click. And it gets me to front parts of my presentation without me needing to open up the bookmarks pane.

The last action that I’ll be showing, in this particular video, is the action to go to a web URL. So, this is a fair early obvious thing. You type in your URL. You type in your Tooltip, go to Microsoft, hover over it, and you get the Tooltip, but nothing actually happens. So, remember, I typed in www at microsoft.com. I forgot to put HTTP:// at the beginning for it to actually work. So, now when I hover over it and Ctrl/click, it gets me to the Microsoft website.

Now, I’m going to click on revert to default and I’m going to change this action again, and this action is going to be a page navigation action. So, this allows me to go to a different page in my file. So, it could be that I wanted to go to the bar chart and I’m going to have a Tooltip, Go to bar chart.

Now, you may not have, by the way, the page navigation action, it has been added, I think, it in 2019 or 2020. So, if you don’t have that, then you may wish to go to a later version of Power BI.

So, now if I click on this, you can see the Tooltip, haven’t clicked on it yet, click on it, and nothing happens because it thinks I want to alter it. Instead in here, the Power BI desktop, I have to use Ctrl and click, and that will take me-

Now, there is one addition I haven’t covered. Well, this six type is currently only available with buttons. So, let’s add a button. I’m going to use a right arrow button. Now, the sixth action that can be used, specifically for buttons is Drill through. So, we had to look at drill through in the last video. But instead of having to click on a particular item and write and click and go to drill through, we can use a button to do that. So, let’s have this button with drill through.

We’re going to our destination. Now, there’s only one destination which is enabled for drill through. So, unlike the page navigation, where we have every single page bar itself, you can’t go from page one to page one. Here, we only have the destinations, which are drill through enabled. So, I’m going to drill through enabled using region name chart. So, I’ve currently got Greater Manchester selected. So, if I Ctrl and click on this, we get through to region name with Greater Manchester. If I change this to Merseyside, we get to Merseyside.

Now, if I don’t click on any particular item, then you’ll see that I don’t have any ability to Ctrl/click on it and go through to a report. It says I need to select a single data point from region name first. So, notice what happens to this button when I click on region name, it becomes enabled. And that’s important because we have got an enabled Tooltip and a disabled Tooltip. So, you can see that there are Tooltip, automatically added, but I’m going to now say click to go through to the region name. And the disabled Tooltip, you need to click on a region name above first. So, here I click to go through to region name and if I deselect all of these region names, then you need to click on a region name above first as shown.

Now, you’ll notice that there is a difference in the colour, between enabled and disabled, and there’s also additional things you can do. It may be that you want a different colour when you hover over something. Well, we can do that in the formatting. For example, button, text, icon outline, fill, and this Isn’t the case for things like shapes. It is specifically for buttons. So, if I’m going to any of these, you’ll see that there is a default state. So, this is your standard state. So, I have my button text actually saying nothing; I’m going to have it say default. But this isn’t necessarily just the default state. There are other states as well and one of these is disabled. So, if I click on Disabled, I can change the text.

So, let’s change the text to disabled. So, we have a default state. We have disabled. We have hovering. So, I’m going to say hover; and we also have press as well. So, I’ve only changed the button text, but you can also change the Icon. So, if you wanted it to be, when it’s disabled blank, you can do so. You can also change things like the outline, the fill, anywhere where you see default state at the very top, you can change. So, maybe, I’ll have for the On hover, a different line colour, I’ll make it red. So, let’s see what we’ve got. First of all, we have got our disabled state, nothing happening. So, I’ve said no icon, and I want the word disabled. Now, I’m going to click on a region name and you can see that we now have our default state. If I hover over it, then we now have our hover state. And you notice that have asked the line for the button, the arrow, to change colour.

So, there are other things I can do, of course. So, in the hover state, maybe, I want a different arrow. It’s got to be something that is going to be reflective for the end user to be able to go, “Oh yes, this is what it means.” And then when I click, you can see that it says the word press. So, I need to Ctrl/click on this the particular version to get through to the region name.

So, equally on this, go back. I can change the default state. I can change the hover so when we’re hovering over it, let’s have not the button text, but did the icon change to a colour blue, for instance; that side, that’s the default state. Let’s change that back to red and let’s change the On hover state to blue. Default means this is what all the others will be initially at the very least. So, when it’s not disabled, when you’re not hovering like this and when you’re not pressing it.

So, we’ve got there quite a few things that you are able to do, buttons; that you are not able to do with other things. So, in this video, we’ve had a look at buttons, but we’ve also had to look at actions more generally with images and shapes. Hopefully, you are forming ideas into your head about how you can help the end user of your ports to be able to navigate to over pages or to drill through. But there’s one action that I haven’t had to look at and we’ll have a look at that in the next video.

51. Enable Natural Language Queries (Ask a Question) and Page Formatting

Now, the final action that I haven’t looked at is the Q&A. And I’m going to put this onto a separate page. So, I’m going to insert a button, Q&A, drag it down to the middle. You’ll see that the default action is Q&A for this one. I’m going to add some button text. What is your question? And make it nice and big.

Now, this can be incorporated into your own reports and pages but I’m just going to have it standalone here. So, I’m just going to move this to one side just to illustrate what it actually does. And to do that, I’ll go to Insert, Ask A Question. So, this insert a new visualisation, by default, it’s just a column chart but it’s actually asking you, in plain English, what question do you have? So, I’m going to say, “What was the sales volume,” and you can see the computer’s already answering the question. Four million per year. And it converts that into a line chart. Or I could say, “Per quarter.” And then it converts it into a bar chart because it knows that that’s part of the hierarchy, not at the end, not the year, so it’s going to have that as non-continuous. It’s going to have it as categories of data or per month in West Yorkshire.

And you can see, the computer does interpret that as meaning, “Okay, let’s find out what the sales volume is per month in the region name called West Yorkshire.” It’s very clever. And if you like this visualisation, then you can click this button to convert it from a Q&A to a standard visualisation. It’s not perfect.

There are some things that it can’t do, that it would like to do. If I Ctrl + click on my icon, here we have got some suggest questions to get you started. For example, what is the average sales price per year in or maybe per region name? So, now I’ve done that. Firstly, it’s helpful for you to be able to quickly create your own visualisations but secondly, let’s see what happens when we publish this to Power BI. So, I’m going to save changes. I’m going to publish this. And then I’m going to view it on the web. So, let’s open it up. We’re in the workspaces. So, it’s gone to my Q&A. I’m going to click on “What is your question?” Now, I can ask my question. So, “What is the average price, let’s say, per year?” And you can see how it is being interpreted.

Now, another thing you can do with the Q&A is bring up any one of your pages as an answer to a question. So, let’s have this matrix page and I’m going to say I want this matrix page to be suggested as an answer to the question, “What are the sales prices?” Well, this to do with sales volume. So, if I just start typing in sales volume or what are the sales volume? And to do this, I go to the Visualisation pane. Not of any particular visualisation but of the entire page. So, I’ve got nothing selected and I go to Format, Page Information and I select Q&A, put it on. So, these are names that I’m putting in that, the end user is going to type, which is going to suggest the word matrix. So, sales volume. Sales volume per year. That sort of thing. So, whenever the end user types that, it’s going to offer this page as a suggestion.

Now, just to have a look at the other formatting of the page, you can also change the page size. You can change the page background and you can change the wallpaper as well. The wallpaper is the bit outside of your page. So, if I change the page background here to a yellow, and you might be going well, why can’t I see yellow? Because it’s also set to 100% transparent. So, I’ll change that to 75%. Or you could add images if you so wished. So, I could add an image of a particular shape in the background but I won’t do that. I’ll add a different coloured wallpaper. I’ll make it red. And I will have it a bit transparent.

So, you can see, we’ve got wallpaper in the report and outside of the report but in the report itself, we only have the page background. So, you can see if I want it just fully yellow, I’ll turn transparency all the way up. If I want some of the red of the wallpaper to go through, I would change the transparency so it’s further down. So, I’m going to make it a fairly light yellow like that and 0% transparent so none of the wallpaper comes through. That way it’s easy to see what is wallpaper, which is the entirety of it, and what is the page background, which is just the report. So, now I have added in this additional question and I have said this page is going to be the answer to the question sales volume per year. I’m now going to republish this. So, now it’s going to come up. I’ll just close the old version. Click on Open, I can type any question. For instance, I’ll type in the question sales volume. And you can see that it is offering the matrix page as an answer to that question. So, it’s thinking it is a synonym. The sales volume and matrix are the same.

Now, if I just exit the full screen, go to the matrix, here you can see the difference between the page background and the wallpaper. So, this report has been formatted as a 16 to 9. You can see that, if I click on the page, not any particular visualisation, go to Page Size, it’s 16 to 9. So, anything that is outside of 16 to 9 is therefore part of the wallpaper.

So, in this video, we’ve had a look at how to use question and answers. We have put it into our own report, so the end user can add questions, and we have pre-populated some of the questions they might want to ask. So, they are not limited to just the ones that you do. But equally, you can ask a question and how a very quick answer to something in English, which might be the basis of a visualisation that you want to use.

And then finally, we have looked at synonyms of entire pages and how the end user can bring that out by typing in just a few words, have that as a suggested answer. So, this is your question and answer, which are also known as natural language queries.