Microsoft® Excel® 2013: Using Power View

Using tiles

You have seen that drill-down is useful to spice up a report. There is a feature in Power View that is amazingly powerful, even if it is not so evident: the ability to use tiles. To see tiles in action, you start with a simple Power View report, containing only month and sales, like the one in Figure 10-32.

Figure 10-32. The TILE BY panel lets you add tiles to your visualization.

Because this report does not contain any selection for the year, it is showing sales divided by month and taking all the years into account. If you want to filter a single year, you can either use the Filters pane or you can use tiles. If you drag the year to the TILE BY panel, the report will be sliced by year and a selector appears on top of it, as shown in Figure 10-33.

Figure 10-33. Tiles are selectors that filter the report in a visual way.

To show data for a single year, it is enough to click a year on the top, and the report is updated automatically. What makes tiles appealing is the fact that, when you use a tile, you are creating a container that surrounds the table. In fact, if you look carefully at the report, you will see that the table has been included in an external container. The container selects the year, and the tables contained into it will obey the specifications of the filter.

At this point, you can enlarge the container and create a new bar chart in it. The bar chart will be filtered by the same year, simply because it is in the same tile section, as shown in Figure 10-34.

Figure 10-34. All the charts and tables inside a tile section will be filtered by the tile.

Using this feature, you can build interactive reports, like the one in Figure 10-35.

Figure 10-35. Using tiles, you can group any kind of visualization into a single container.