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

47. Use Bookmarks for Reports

Right. I’m going to create a story line. I’m going to do a presentation. And I’m going to say, first of all, this is the overall picture from 1995 to 2016. Then, I’m going to look at 2000 to 2009. And I’m going to just show the Top 2 regions so I can focus on them. Then I’m going to talk about 2006 and then 2009. The problem with all of this is that, in a presentation it’s, yeah, you could sort of say, okay, I’m going to change this 2000. I’m going to change this to 2009 but then changing this, so that it’s the Top 2 and then clicking on it, it’s not really a very presentable way of doing things.

What you can do instead is set up your display exactly how you want and then create a bookmark. Bookmarks allow you to save which page you’re on, any filters, slices, including what the values are, sorts, drills, locations, whether things are being shown, the visibility and the focus or spotlight of any particular visible object.

So, let’s start off at the beginning. I want this to be my first bookmark. So, I’m going to go to View and Bookmark panes. So, I want to add my current state of what I’m seeing as my first bookmark, so I’ll click add and I’m going to rename that, overall. Next, I’m going to change this so that it is the year 2000 to the year 2009, make it the 31st of the December. And I’m going to change this so that it is filtering on the Top 2.

So, I’ll go into the visual filters and say that, the region name, the Top 2 values according to the sales volume, Apply filter. So, this is going to be my next, so I’m going to say 2000 to 2009 with Top 2 and then I’m going to look at 2004. So, this is a highlighter, so I’m going to click this and say, we name 2004. And then I’m going to compare and contrast that with 2009 or 2000. Their 2006 has got West Yorkshires as one of the Top 2, 2008 has got West Midlands.

So, I want something with West Midland so I’ll use 2008, so I will Add this as a View. So, now to get in between these Views, all I have to do is click on the Bookmark and it instantly takes me to where I was at the time of creating the bookmark.

Now, maybe my bookmarks, I don’t want it to affect absolutely everything, so I can click on the dot-dot-dot (…) and say what are you going to affect? Are you going to affect Data properties like filters and slices and sort states? Are you going to affect Display properties such as these spot liking and any visibility of objects? And which page is visible? And also, is it All visuals or is it just Selected visuals?

Now, let’s say I also wanted to not show the slicer or the Instructions once I get past overall, so I get into Bookmarks. So now I’m going to select the Selection pane and here, I’m going to say, okay, these Instructions, I want to hide this visual. So, just click on each one if you’re not sure where things are. So, here’s the Shape, here’s the Filter, I’ll keep the filter. So, I’m going to therefore say that this is going to be my new 2000 to 2009, so I’m going to Update this Bookmark.

So, now here’s my Overall with all of this shown and then here’s my Bookmark and you see the objects that have asked to not be shown. They’ve got a little icon next, when that is shown then those particular shapes are not going to be shown, displayed. So, Filter by Dates by dates is displayed but here they’re not going to be displayed. And finally, these pre-bookmarks, these are yearly views. So, I’m going to select them all, I’m holding down control and clicking each one click the dot-dot-dot (…) and I’m going to group them together.

So, this group is going to be yearly views. And with this, I can have a lot of Bookmarks that are hidden away by just clicking on this arrow. So, if I need them, they’re there, if I don’t, I can just hide them away.

So, hopefully this shows the power of Bookmarks, especially when used in conjunction with the Selection pane. So, you can go to a particular layout, particular filter, particular objects being shown and then very swiftly move to another one and make your presentation a lot easier to do.

48. ** Group and Layer Visuals by Using the Selection Pane

In this video, we’re going to look further at the selection pane. So, we’ve previously seen that you can show or hide visualisations, but what else can you do with it?

Well, there are two tabs at the top, Layer order and Tab order. So, Tab order, if I click on a visualisation, I can then use the tab to go from one to another. Now, it will skip any visualisations which are currently hidden. If I want to change the order, suppose I wanted this year to go further up, I’ll just drag it.

Now, you don’t have to do this resorting yourself, there is this icon, and that will resort them in order of visual order, sort of words, top to bottom, left to right, or right to left. So, if I click that, then you can see that it now goes in a visual order. We can also move them up and down by using the arrow keys as well.

Now, if I go into Layer order, this will show which visualisations on top of which others. So, if I show the Instructions and I put them on top of this Photo by Dates, then you can see that at the moment, Instructions is on top because Instructions is higher up in the Layer Order, however, if I drag it down, then now you can see Filter by Dates is on top because it’s higher up.

Again, you can also use the up or down arrow keys to move it as well.

Now, another thing that you can do is group visualisations together. So, let’s group this visualisation and then hold onto Ctrl and click on the second visualisation, this one. Again, we could do it over here as well. So, click on the first, hold down Ctrl, click on the last. Similarly, Shift allows you to go from the first to the last. If you use Ctrl, then you are clicking not a range, but just two visualisations, if you Shift, then you’re clicking however many visualisations there are between the first one and the last one that you clicked. So, however, you selected your visualisations, you can now click on the dot, dot, dot, and go to group. So, if I group these together, then whenever I click on one, I click on the entire group. So, you can see they are shown as a group here, and if I wanted to rename the group, then I can do so by just double-clicking on to it. So, this is my new group.

Now, there aren’t that many properties that you can use with groups, but if I click on the group, you can see that there is a background colour.

Now, if I click on the background, click it on and choose a background, you can see that it fills in all of the white space between the first and last visualisations. In other words, it’s not just the same as applying a background to two individual visualisations, you’re now doing it to an entire group, including all the white space in between, so I’d be very careful using this background as you may be hiding, got some other visualisations. Now, you can also ungroup and that then removes the group.

So, this is how you can use the selection pane. So, you can use it for layering purposes, so which visualisations go on top of which others, you can group visualisations together, and you can say what order they will be in when you click tab between the visualisations.

49. Drill through

In previous videos, we had a look at interactions between visuals. For instance, I could click on Greater Manchester and I can see it highlighted or if I edit the interactions by going to Visual tools, Format, Edit interactions, then I can change it from a highlight to a filter so that when I click on say, Greater Manchester, all I see are Greater Manchester’s results.

But what if I wanted to do more than that? What about if when I click on Greater Manchester, I want to have the option of being able to see a very different set of visuals potentially based on what I’ve just clicked on. So, Greater Manchester, for instance. I want a page specifically designed for individual regions and we can do this by something called Drill through.

So, what happens is that I can click on, it’s actually right-hand clicking on a particular region and I can get an option, a drill through option, to say, go to another page which is based on your selection. Now, this second page is probably going to be quite differently redesigned from the first page, so let’s see what we can do. The reason for that is, we don’t need the column of data plus this graph. That’s probably getting a bit too far. We’ll probably just need one set of data, so maybe if I have a column, a clustered column chart, and I will put in the date, the years, going across. So, I’ll put this into the axis and I will put the sales volume in the value. So it can have of that as one particular visualisation. And then maybe I’ll copy this and have a second visualisation based on the month so we can see the monthly rate of change, and then maybe another chart which shows the percentage of the change over the 12 months. So that in the value and the date.

So, we can see that and then, maybe, end of a chart, let’s have a look. Maybe, we’ll have a Stacked chart and this Stacked chart can have again, the date and we’re going to have the, no, we’ll make it a line chart and we’re going to have the flat price. So, that’s apartment price and we’ll have the detached houses’ price and we’ll have the semi-detached houses’ price and we’ll have the terraced price as well.

Now, I wouldn’t actually design a webpage necessarily like this, I would be using other visualisations that we haven’t yet got onto, but we’ll have a look at those in future levels. So, currently this is for all regions and I want to narrow it down, so here is my series of charts. Now, what I do, is I scroll down to the drill through section in the visualisations pane and I drag what I want to filter by, in this case, the region name into there.

Now, you notice there is one option to keep all filters on or off. I’ll just switch that off for now. I’ll turn it on later and you can see what the difference is. So, region name is all and allow drill through when they’re being used as a category or when they are summarised.

Now, I’ve not actually yet come through any actual use situation where you should use summarised. It seems to be the case that you’ll always use it as use as category and I’ve done quite a lot of searching to try and find an answer to that question. So, always use the Drill through as use as category. So, all you need to do therefore, to activate drill through, is just drag the field that you are going to be filtering on into the drill through section.

Now, if I go to any particular region, nothing seems to have changed, but if I right-hand click, then I have a new option, Drill through and the name of the page that I can go to. So, I Drill through charts. So, now it is solely showing me Greater Manchester and you can see that down here, region name is Greater Manchester.

Now, it would be good to have this as a title. What I’m going to do is just use a visualisation we haven’t actually covered yet and that is the card visualisation. I’ll just insert a card visualisation, which just carries basically one piece of data and I’m going to add into there the region name and there we can see Greater Manchester, but I’ll be covering the card in greater detail later. So, I’m just going to apply a background to that using the formatting. There we go and probably just reduce the size of the text as well and that’s in data label. So, I can go back and click on a different region, drill through, charts and there we have West Yorkshire. And this needn’t just be limited to one particular page, I can go to other pages, pages like the matrix page and here we have Merseyside.

So, I will drill through and find the Merseyside data. And if you want to make sure that this is Merseyside, well, you can always get rid of the filter temporarily by just clicking on this eraser. And now it says at the top Greater Manchester, this really is for all the areas.

Now, I can also drill through analyses as well, I don’t just have to click on the region name. So, here I’m clicking on a number and that’s getting me to the Tyne and Wear chart.

Now, what is this Keep all filters? Well, let’s go back to this example and I’m going to click on 2004 and you can see it’s going to highlight all of the 2004s.

We had previously set this up in the edit interactions and you can see that there is a filter going on between these two visualisations. If I now have a look at the drill through for Greater Manchester, you can see that it ignores that 2004 filter that I’ve got in my page one chart, my page one page. If, however, I click on a Keep all filters, go back to here, I’ll click on 2005, drill through Greater Manchester and now it’s just showing me 2005. So, we now have this chart, a monthly chart being solely based on 2005. So, that’s the difference between these, the Keep all filters or not, it’s whether you have any of the other filters on your originating chart coming through or whether you want to exclude them and just show the entirety of the data, except for the region name that you’ve just clicked on. So, here you can see the visualisation of all of the other filters, so we’ve got the slicer filter that’s being incorporated.

So again, if there were no filters and I was just drilling through, then you’d see from 1995, all the way to 2016. If, however, I do keep all of the filters, even if I don’t select any particular year, if I drill through there, because of the slicer filter that’s on the right-hand side, it will apply that and we’ll have from 2000 and 2009. So, Keep all filters, very useful, but use with care I would suggest.

So, if you want to be able to drill into greater detail on a particular topic, in this case, a region name chart, then you can do that by going to the drill through and setting a filter based on that particular column. And then that becomes available to all of the different charts and pages, not just the one that you might initially got or that would be a good idea if that was there, but to all of them. It’s a very useful feature.

Just one word about terminology, the difference between Drill through and Drill down. If I click on this particular chart, I can drill down to the next level, so currently it’s looking at years and now if I click on any particular year, it will be showing me 2006 of that particular year. So, that is drill down. Drill through goes through to another page and shows information based on what you’ve have drilled. So, drill down, you remain on the same page, drill through, you go elsewhere.

Just one final note. You may have seen in more recent versions of Power BI that there is this cross report. So, this allows you to drill from one report to another report. So, this is used on the Power BI Service. So, we’ll be having a look at this when we look at the Power BI Service, because all of these reports need to be uploaded onto the Power BI Service for this to actually have any functionality. So, a cross report, useful when you’re going from, essentially one file to another file on the Power BI Service.