Visuals in Power BI

Practice tasks

This section provides a simple case study for you to study and solve using information from this chapter. This section also contains a series of practice questions for you to answer.

Case study

Suppose you work for a company that manufactures hair products and has broad expertise in various channels of the cosmetic industry. You have been given data collected across different dimensions of the business over the preceding five years.

Consider the following scenarios and determine what type of visual would work best in each case.

• Scenario 1 You want to analyze sales data for various products by region.

  Solution Use a map visual.

• Scenario 2 You want to view overall sales data for all categories for each month over the past 13 months to identify trends.

  Solution Use a line chart.

• Scenario 3 You want to compare sales volume data for all products in a region against a sales trend analysis data for that region

  Solution Use an area chart.

• Scenario 4 You want to compare sales trends for various shampoo brands.

  Solution Use a bar or column chart.

• Scenario 5 You want to compare sequential data with its running total to assess profitability over time.

  Solution Use a waterfall chart.

Practice questions

1. What are visuals?

2. What type of visual is best for comparing categorical data?

3. What type of visual is best for comparing sequential data?

4. What type of visual might you use to depict volume-based data?

5. What type of visual is best for representing time-based data?

6. Why would you use a pie or donut chart?

7. What type of visual is best-suited for depicting geographical data?

8. Which type of map is provided by ESRI?

9. What type of chart best depicts progress toward a goal?

10. What does KPI stand for?

11. What are the uses and benefits of cards and multi-row cards?

12. Under what circumstance might you use a matrix?

13. Why might you use a treemap?

14. What type of visualization helps filter data?

15. How do you import a third-party visual from within Power BI?

16. What is visual-level filter in Power BI?

17. What is a page-level filter in Power BI?

18. What is a drill-through filter in Power BI?

19. True or false: To filter data for an entire report, you use the report-level filter.

20. What is the difference between a page-level filter and a report-level filter?