Bar and column charts – Creating Reports

Bar and column charts

Another set of fundamental visualizations is the bar and column charts. Power BI provides several different bar and column chart visualizations that allow you to present data in different ways using clustered and stacked formats. The stacked bar chart will group data categories into single bars, as shown in Figure 9.11:

Figure 9.11 – Stacked column chart visual

The clustered column chart visual will group categories of data in multiple bars rather than stacking. Figure 9.12 shows an example clustered column chart showing the same data as Figure 9.11, but you can see how the data is presented in both stacked and clustered formats:

Figure 9.12 – Clustered column chart visual

Stacked and clustered bar and column charts can be used in many cases, but they present the data differently, so it’s good to experiment with both to best determine which is best to use in your use case.

Line and area charts

The line chart and area chart visuals are useful for displaying data over time. The area chart is like the line chart, with the addition of the area between the line and the x axis filled in. You will see similarities between the line and area charts but sometimes area becomes the best visual to use if you need to emphasize change over time.

Figure 9.13 – Line and area chart visuals

Pie chart, donut chart, and treemaps

The pie treemap, donut chart, and pie chart visuals allow you to depict the relationship between subsets of data and the whole. These visuals can be very colorful and are useful when portraying percentages of a whole, such as which regions of the country make up the majority of the total sales for a country.

The pie chart is like pie charts in any other plotting tool, made up of a filled-in circle, while the donut chart is a circular bar that plots the size of each value based on the size of the whole circle. It is slightly easier for most people to see the percentage differences in a donut chart compared to a pie chart.

Figure 9.14 – Pie and donut chart visuals

A common problem with these visualizations is trying to present too many categories at once. It is recommended to refer to your requirements to ensure that you’re only adding categories that are needed and that you’re not adding additional categories of data that will make the visuals overly complex. When presenting many categories of data, it’s recommended to use multiple visuals and typically use another kind or style of visual.

Figure 9.15 – Pie and donut chart visuals show date data

While the pie and donut charts use circles to represent an entire dataset, the treemap visual instead uses a box or rectangle. Like the pie and donut charts, the treemap also uses colors to represent different categories of data and likewise, the treemap is useful when depicting a part of the whole. For example, if the whole box represents the total sales for the country, the colored boxes inside will be sized to represent each region and each region will use different colors to distinguish between them. The treemap visual will arrange the boxes inside from top left to lower right in largest to smallest order.

Figure 9.16 – Treemap visual

We can see in Figure 9.16 how a treemap visual is used to represent gross revenue by region and product item group.

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