PL-300 – Section 3: Part 1 Level 2: Formatting our first visualization Part 2

20. 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 visualisations. 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 these styles.

So, None just gives you a really standard style but you’ll notice that all of the visualisations 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 None and Minimal. It’s got a little bit of colour in the dividing lines and it’s slightly spaced out. So, if I just go into the Field formatting for RegionName and just refer it to format, so here you can see the difference between the None and Minimal.

Bold header is Minimal but it just colours the header. And again, if you don’t like that particular colour, 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 sixth 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 colour and a Background colour as we have with the Column headers and the Totals, but also an Alternate font colour and an Alternate background colour. So, maybe I wanted the back colour to be blue. Or, perhaps, a bit lighter than that, 60% lighter. No, I want it even lighter, maybe. So, let’s just find a suitable colour. There we go.

Contrasting alternating rows just gives you the Alternating rows, but with a black background for the first third and fifth.

Flashy rows. Well, that’s sort of what I was trying to do in the previous video. So, the previous visualisation. So, we have a blue, but then a darker blue, maybe a bit of a green.

And again, you can have that wave of flasher headers as well.

Sparse just gives you 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 are unsure how much colour 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 colours 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 because it’s switched off. But if I switched 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 centre 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 Minimal, 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 colours that I’ve got. But, unfortunately, if you go to Grid, you’ll find that you can’t choose a No colour, like you can in Excel. You have to choose a colour, even if that colour is white.

So, this background is probably not so useful for tables, probably, more useful for other visualisation. Like if I go into a Pie chart, you can see the visualisation there may work quite nicely with a yellow background but here it just gives a yellow outline.

Then there is a Border. So, if we 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’ll give a curve around the edges, which could be quite appealing depending on what you’ve got.

And then finally, we’ve got a Tooltip at the bottom. So, this is shown when you hover over the visualisation.

So, these are some of the stylistic formattings that you can do, not just with tables, but with other visualisations as well. So, you can have a choice of default styles. You can add in titles and format them. You can add backgrounds. They’re probably not that good with tables. And you can add borders and have them slightly curved. Now, you’ll notice that this visualisation doesn’t quite fit the space that we’ve given it and we’ll solve that in the next video.

21. Position Visuals

Now, in this video, we’re going to have a look at resizing visualisations. So, you can see in this particular visualisation 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 the Word wrap, you can see it is on. If it was off, then you would have this dot-dot-dot (…) 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 visualisations. So, if you click on the visualisation, you can see that there are these eight little pointers all around. These markers are where you can drag the visualisation. So, you can drag it so that you resize it further down, or further across, or further down and across 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 sits a lot tighter.

Now if you want to move the visualisation, then hover over any of these bits which are not these markers. Now, in other programmes, 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 visualisation to any other 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 X position of 10, that will move it slightly further to the left, or 100, or 1000. Thousand 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 would have the X position at zero. The Y position at zero. So, no need to drag it. And see if, you know, 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 the 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 accessibility software they’re using, when they have a look at this Power BI, they’ll be able to see, albeit more accurately hear, “This is my Sales Volume per Region Name.”

What I’m going to do next is I’m going to copy this visualisation. 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 dropdown 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 + C. C for copy. So when I’ve done that, I can paste. Now, that pastes the entire visualisation, and to paste you either press Ctrl + V or you click on Home, Paste.

Now, I can drag it around just like any other visualisation 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 align to the middle of the page. Alternatively, I can try and get it centre aligned to the middle of page or right-aligned, but it will also align with other visualisations. So, if I just move it up, you’ll see that now it is both top- and bottom-aligned with both. Both visualisations are at the same top and the same height. Similarly, I could have them so that one is directly underneath another. So, that’s quite good if you literally were having one underneath each other. And here we’ve got them, literally one underneath each other and at the same left and the same right. Now, it is possible to overlap two visualisations, and I’ll see how we can work through this bit better in the next video.

22. Align Visuals

Now, in the last video we copied a visualisation and put it on top of the second one. In this video we’re going to see what we can do with multiple visualisations.

First of all, I’m just going to take one visualisation. And you’ll see that when I click on a particular visualisation, first of all, we have all of these markers around which denote that it has been selected.

But secondly, we got this new visuals tools menu which only appears when I select a visualisation. And I would take a look at the Align. First of all, I can align a visualisation to the left, the centre, or the right of the screen, the top, the middle, or the bottom. So, if I wanted it to be the centre middle, that would be very quick to do. But, of course, you can do all of that with the little helper lines as well. There we go.

But we can also use a line with more than one visualisations. So, if I selected, not just one, but two visualisations, now, how am I going to do that? Well, there are at least two possible ways. One way is to go from the left hand corner and drag all the way to the right hand corner and select the multiple objects. Alternatively, I need to click on the first visualisation and then go to the second visualisation, hold down the Ctrl and click. So, now you can see both of these have been selected.

So, I can now align centre, left or right. And what this does if these visualisations are of differing widths, like this, then aligning left, centre, right will make these visualisations aligned. They will still be aligned if they are of the same width, but it’s much more visual if they are of different widths.

Similarly, of they are of different heights, so I’ll just make this a much taller, select off, click one, hold down Ctrl, click another. Then I can align top, middle, and bottom. To again have various alignments.

Now, if I just select the one again, you’ll notice that there is another option available – Distribute horizontally, Distribute vertically. However, this just doesn’t solve the question of what happens if you’ve got two visualisations that are literally right on top of each other. So, now I’m getting these two visualisations to be exactly the same width and height but you can see they overlap. Well, trouble is, one of them has to be in front of the other. But you can select which one. By clicking on a visualisation and either Bring forwards or Send backwards. So, imagine that you have got a series of playing cards. And one playing card, in this case this one, is behind but slightly above another one, so you can’t see the bottom of the card. So, that is what sending backwards does. It has it going all the way back to the end of the deck. However, bringing it forwards, puts it further and further and further in front of the desk. So, if there were 52 playing cards and it was right at the back then Bring it forward would make it 51st from the front, and then 50th, and then 49th. So, any objects it’s now in front of would be obscured by it. But Bring to front brings it right to the front of the deck to number one. So, now you can see it is number one in the deck, right at the front. Similarly, send it backwards and send it to the back does the same; it sends it back by one position or send it back all the way. So, hopefully you won’t have overlapping visualisations that often. But if you do, it’s useful to know how you can actually deal with it. So, you can have it aligned exactly, or you can have one on top of another when needed. But generally that’s not a good idea. So, now going to get rid of this second visualisation but just highlighting it and pressing Delete. And that removes the visualisation.