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The Data Daily

Use These Great Visualizations to Impress Your Audience

Use These Great Visualizations to Impress Your Audience

Many companies have chosen Microsoft Power BI for reporting and dashboards. Beyond the common charts (e.g. line chart, bar chart), there are many other visual types in Power BI that you can use to impress your audience.

I’ve noticed that businesses are easily impressed by animations. SandDance clearly knows how to attract audiences through a dramatic view of data. Each sand “grain” represents a data element that is uniquely displayed through color, shape, and position.

Use case: SandDance is great for visualizations where data is not pre-aggregated (i.e. many individual records). It can be rearranged into groups on the screen—right before your eyes—to create a ‘wow’ moment.

Animated bar charts use smooth transition animations to show changes in rankings over time.

Use case: It works best if you would like to show the year over year changes for different groups (i.e. sales departments).

The bowtie chart is used to provide a quick value comparison between categories and most importantly, their data flow. There are only a few settings, but the display is clear and easy to understand.

Use case: The bowtie chart works best if you want to see a channel-based flow between category (e.g. product group: furniture) and sub-category (e.g. product types: chair, desk, etc.) or an end-to-end process (e.g. left/source: #candidates, right/destination: #decisions (pass/reject))

Not only does Pulse Chart provide an animation showing how the data fluctuates over time, but when a particular event occurs, it will also pause the animation and a pop-up event box appears. This helps capture audience attention and distill trends by highlighting any specific, yet significant occurrence.

Use Case: If you want to present a month-by-month sales report, Pulse Chart could help! It allows you to add labels for significant increases over time (e.g. Thanksgiving or Christmas holiday).

Time Brush acts more as a visual itself rather than a plain slicer. It allows you to filter time, in such a way that you can simultaneously view changes to the visualization.

Use case: Time Brush works best if your data spans a long time period and you would like to provide a closer look at the different periods in order to gauge deep-dive insights.

Viola embeds data science techniques into data visualizations to help clients understand their data better and access it in more intuitive and useful ways. You can connect with her throughLinkedIn.

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