Dan Edwards : Data visualization best practices with Power BI
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30 octobre 2017 Groupe Excel et Power BI Sujet: La visualisation de données (en anglais) Conférencier: Dan Edwards Voici la présentation du conférencier Dan Edwards sur les meilleures pratiques d'affaires à adopter en visualisation de données, avec Power BI (en anglais)
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Dan Edwards : Data visualization best practices with Power BI
- 9. “If no one remembers the numbers then you have not communicated” – Robert Kosara “Visualization doesn’t happen on a page or on a screen. It happens in the viewer’s brain” – Robert Spence “By visualizing information, we turn it into…a sort of information map. And when you’r e lost in information, an information map is kind of useful.” – David McCandless “More often than not, the presentation of quantitative information fails to communicate information clearly and efficiently” – Stephen Few “Fundamentally, Data Visualization is not about technology but about Que stions and Answers” – Jeff Heer “Most dashboards…deliver only a fraction of the insight that is nee ded to monitor the business.” – Stephen Few
- 10. @AXUG 11 If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. Albert Einstein
- 11. 912 87% 25% 2000 2012 Goldfish Forget own Birthday teens who forget major details of close friends and relatives
- 12. Why?
- 13. What do the scientist say? "More than ever, research is highlighting a trend in reduced attention and concentration spans…the younger generation appear to be the worst afflicted," - sociologist David Moxon “…individuals who multitask emails, phone calls and social-networking sites have more trouble paying attention and focusing on important information” – The New York Times “…lack of attention has a serious impact on task performance and increases the risk of accidents.” – sociologist David Moxon
- 14. Stress and Attention Span “When you are stressed … this stress takes a lot of resources from your brain and interferes with your capacity to encode any new information.” Centre of Studies on Human Stress
- 15. Customers use Matrix or Table 90% of the time, when building and presenting Online Analytics Excel Syndrome 1. Problem 2. Solution: Spreadsheet 3. Another problem 4. Solution: Bigger spreadsheet. 5. GOTO 1
- 16. Quiz time!
- 17. product category revenue country revenue Question 1
- 18. Time!
- 20. product category revenue channel revenue promotion revenue Question 2
- 21. Time!
- 25. Good Charts, Berinato, Page 34
- 39. Black text on a white background works well. White text on a black background works well. Yellow text on a white background works poorly. Blue text on a black background works poorly.
- 41. Light Palette R G B HEX 140 140 140 #8C8C8C 136 189 230 #88BDE6 251 178 88 #FBB258 144 205 151 #90CD97 246 170 201 #F6AAC9 191 165 84 #BFA554 188 153 199 #BC99C7 237 221 70 #EDDD46 240 126 110 #F07E6E Medium Palette R G B HEX 77 77 77 #4D4D4D 93 165 218 #5DA5DA 250 164 58 #FAA43A 96 189 104 #60BD68 241 124 176 #F17CB0 178 145 47 #B2912F 178 118 178 #B276B2 222 207 63 #DECF3F 241 88 84 #F15854 Dark & Bright Palette R G B HEX 0 0 0 #000000 38 93 171 #265DAB 223 92 36 #DF5C24 5 151 72 #059748 229 18 111 #E5126F 157 114 42 #9D722A 123 58 150 #7B3A96 199 180 46 #C7B42E 203 32 39 #CB2027
- 58. Emphasized Neither emphasized or de-emphasized Neither emphasized or de-emphasized De-emphasized
- 73. Berinato, S. (2016). Good Charts. Boston, MA, USA: Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Few, S. (2012). Show Me the Numbers. Burlingame, CA: Analytics Press. Hollinsworth, D. (2014, April 28). The Goldfish Effect: How Short Attention Spans are Killing your Productivity. Retrieved from https://www.targit.com/en/blog/2014/04/data- visualization-goldfish-effect Knaflic, C. N. (2015). storytelling with data. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Notas do Editor
- Welcome to Data Visualization Best Practices for Power BI.
- In this session this morning I have 3 goals. Help you understand why visualizations and tools like Power BI are important. Identify best practices in creating visualizations and finally look at ways to apply these best practices specifically in Power BI.
- So our agenda is pretty straight forward. We will start by looking at the importance of data visualization. We will move into the best practices and during this time I will also show some samples and demos in Power BI. I do have a lot of slides, but I also have a lot of demos. At the end I have some links and information on where you can learn more.
- A brief introduction. My name is Dan Edwards and I am a CPA and Senior Manager with Crowe Horwath. We are the #8 CPA firm in the US. I am a member of our Performance Consulting team where we implement ERP solutions like Dynamics 365 as well as deliver Business Intelligence solutions built around the Microsoft stack. Prior to joining Crowe, I have spent over 25 years in the technology industry including working with a couple BI vendors.
- I am sure many of you might have felt like this guy before. You are putting information into your various systems, but once it goes in, it seems like you can’t get it out. Well that is where Analytics and tools like Power BI are supposed to help out, but you often end up feeling like this…
- So now that you have Power BI, you can create charts and graphs and next thing you know you are overwhelmed.
- So let’s take a step back. We haven’t always had tools like Power BI. I remember my early days in Public Accounting and we had almost everything on green ledger paper. But that made it very hard for non accountant to understand what was going on in the business. And of course there is more data than just accounting information. So that led to Business Intelligence.
- The whole BI process is made up of 6 main steps. Raw data from transactional systems. This can be your ERP or CRM system and/or other databases. This data is generally Extracted from those systems, transformed into data that is easier to use for reporting purposes and then loaded into a data warehouse. The data warehouse is where we begin to create usable information. And on top of that we might create some Multidimensional cubes for better Analysis. We visualize the data in tables and graphs... That tell a story about the data... Hopefully we learn something... And put what we learned into action. And the whole thing starts over again. So Data Visualization spans between Visualization and Story Telling. And without Data Visualization, then you have a big leap from the Information you’ve got to the Learning you can gain from it and ultimately take action. So that’s why Data Visualization is so important. It’s an essential part of any BI tool set.
- There are lots of experts in the field of visualization. Some of these guys have been around many years. They have a lot of knowledge. I’ve picked out a few of their quotes. My favorite so far is Stephen Few.
- A very smart man said it well.
- I borrowed this from a former colleague of mine. The average attention span of a gold fish is 9s Our average attention span in 2000 was 12s Our average attention span is now 8s A few more just for the fun of it! Percent of people who forget their own birthdays from time to time – 7% Percent of teens who forget major details of close friends and relatives – 25%
- So Why? Why has is gone down from 12 to 8. And that doesn’t sound like much, but it’s actually quite a big decrease. We’re talking over 30% in over 12 years and it doesn’t look like it’s getting any better.
- I’m 52 years old and I have 4 children, well the youngest is 15 now. I think about the things that I did as a kid or even the things my oldest who is now 26 and it amazes me how much information kids are exposed to today. They have a computer, a table, a phone, and an Xbox or Playstation. They have email, social media accounts, they do video chats, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook Live and 400 channels on the TV, plus Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and the list grows daily.. Think about what we all have to endure. Email. Not just on our computers but on our phones and tablets. Skype. Company Portals. CRM. ERP. Reports. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and that doesn’t even include all the news you can get from the internet. Who reads the newspaper anymore?
- Well, stress and attention span has a very close link between the 2. Here is a scientific study about this point from the Centre of Studies on Human Stress. When you are stressed…this stress takes a lot of resources from your brain and interferes with your capacity to encode any new information. “Interferes with your capacity to encode any new information” That is exactly what we’re trying to do when we’re looking at Data Visualization. And with Business Intelligence we’re trying to include, make sense of it, take action on it. So stress is one cause.
- Another cause, which I like to call Spreadsheet Overdose. Customers that I run across, use Spreadsheets 90% of the time. You have a problem so you build a spreadsheet. Oh and you love your spreadsheets. But you fall prey to Excel Syndrome. And looking at these spreadsheets it’s hard to get learning and actions in the 8 Seconds we’ve got.
- Maybe you don’t believe me. I’d like to try something with you. I’d like to try a quiz with you.
- What I intend to do is give you 2 questions. I’m going to show you a dataset. A small dataset with revenue per product category and revenue per country. What I’d like you to do, is tell me which product category has the largest revenue and which country has the largest revenue. Once you find the answer to this, jot it down for me and raise your hand. I want to see how long it takes the first person to get the right answer.
- So the answer is Computers and United States
- So the answer is Computers, Store and North America Back-to-School Promotion. The difference between finding the 2 answers in the first test and the 3 answers here is about 20 to 25 seconds. Which doesn’t sound like a lot.
- But when you multiply that by the number of decisions you make in a day by the number of people that make those types of decisions in your organization and by the number of days you make those decisions it’s significant. An average size company with 50 people making 10 decisions per day, that’s 50 X 10 X 250 X 25 = 3125000 seconds or 868 hours per year
- Vision is not just one of the five channels through which we sense the world; it is by far the dominant and most powerful sense. Vision provides more information than all the other senses combined, not only in terms of sheer volume but also in subtlety. [CLICK] When written as text, numbers must be processed one at a time, which is slow. When numbers are held and manipulated in our minds, most of us quickly become lost. [CLICK] When we represent quantitative information in visual form, our ability to think about it is dramatically enhanced. Visual representations not only make the patterns, trends, and exceptions in numbers visible and understandable, they also extend the capacity of our memory, making available in front of our eyes what we couldn’t otherwise hold all at once in our minds. In simple terms, information visualization helps us think.
- So now that we understand the need for visualizations and how our eyes interact with visualization, that leads us to the critical piece. How do I create visualizations that people will really use??
- So what makes for a good dashboard? It should be organized, summarized, specific yet concise. Sounds easy enough, right?
- Unfortunately while we take classes in school on how to write and how to do math, very few of us actually take any classes or training on how to produce visualizations. We simply start working with some software and see what we get. Fortunately there are many books available that include some best practices. Let’s go through a few of these in more detail
- First we need to start with the right visualization
- Power BI offers many different visualizations including all of the standard chart types, but they also offer Gauges, Maps, Cards and of course custom visualizations. The choices can some times be overwhelming and depending on your choice the story you are trying to tell may change. In addition there are many custom visualizations that can easily be added into Power BI to create unique visualizations. We will look at a few of those today as well.
- This table of data works well if we need precise values or an easy way to look up individual values and this is what many people believe they want. However, sense-making involves operations that go beyond looking up specific values in a table like the one we see here. For this example, to understand the trends in sales revenue and the relationships among the data we need to compare revenue to other variables that might help us find relationships, patterns, and outliers. [CLICK] Was it immediately obvious that Europe revenue has been basically flat? How about that the North America trend seems to have a quick rise at the beginning of Q2 & Q4 and the overall trend is up? Of course we could divine these things from the table directly, but visually the answers are immediately obvious without all the effort. Patterns and relationships are what we strive to find and understand when we analyze data.
- But Visualization for visualization sake is not enough. You should choose your objects with care. Here is a pie chart of overall sales by Manufacturer. I would challenge you to rank the Manufacturers from top selling to bottom. Pie charts are actually really lousy graphics for most cases, so what is better than Pie, [CLICK] Well donuts of course. However when it comes to visualizations Donuts are just Pies with the middle taken out. If you had two or maybe three items, then they work, but for something like this, you would be much better off with a… [CLICK] …column chart. Or a bar chart. It is so much easier for the eye to pick up the difference between the lengths of the bars than the size of the pie slices. In addition… [CLICK] …if we sorted by largest to smallest, we make it even easier. Column and Bar charts are often ignored because they are so common, but this is a great reason to use them and they are common so people know how to read them. No not only for your waist line, but for your data visualizations, be careful with the Pie and Donuts
- Even if you choose the correct visualization, the setup can still make it very misleading. In this case, Switzerland looks like it is way behind the other countries, but if you look closely you might notice the Y axis of the chart does not start at $0. Once we adjust the axis you will see all 5 countries are actually very close in sales.
- As we saw earlier, line charts can be very useful in displaying trends, but if you are not analyzing over time they again can be very misleading.
- This is one example of many tools that are available to help determine the best chart type depending on the message you are trying to deliver. We could spend an entire day going through all of the different visualization types, but as you saw in the examples if you choose the wrong type it can be misleading.
- So now that we have an understanding on how to choose the right visualization, what can we do to help our readers pick out the right information and follow the story we are trying to tell. Remember readers do not necessarily read in order or read everything in the visualization. So the next best practice to keep in mind is Contrast gives focus
- Look at this first gauge, all numbers appear the same, nothing jumps out, but (click) if you look at the second gauge, our eyes are focused on Growth because the bold gives focus. But you need to be careful with Contrast, too much will overload the reader.
- In addition to contrast, another best practice is Color, but color can be very hard to master.
- Next lets talk about color. This one is always fun and it seems everyone wants everything in color, but again there are some things to remember. Some color combinations work well, while others do not.
- Also Color can be distracting – and it should not be used, simply to make the analytic look “nice”
- Another thing to remember with using color is 10% of males and 1% of females suffer from colorblindness. Color should make the user aware of differences or as contrast to make something stand out. If you try to emphasis too much it becomes the rule versus the exception then you simply have visual clutter. This slide has some samples of useful color palettes. At the end of the presentation I will provide some information on how to download these palettes as Power BI themes. http://www.rapidtables.com/convert/color/rgb-to-hex.htm https://powerbi.tips/tools/color-theme-generator/
- Speaking of themes, I want to highlight a web site that can be used to correct themes for Power BI
- In addition there is a Color theme gallery that is available
- Let’s look into Power BI and see how we can work with themes and colors. Turn on Report Themes in preview Show how to import themes Demonstrate the effect
- Gauges and charts are typically used to present high-level information, so it is a good idea to reduce the number of digits used. This allows the consumer to process the information faster and remember it when needed later.
- Show rounding features Show Sales Dashboard – point out how Auto picks different levels of rounding (K, M, & B)
- Or you could use a heatmap, or highlight on a crosstab
- If you have trouble narrowing down the important information, it is a good idea is to simplify by only indicating information if there is a problem. For example, with an indicator, like on this gauge.
- Show how to use conditional formatting - diverging Show how I created the red highlight by using a column charth Use Only the Negative demo screen
- While overuse of color and graphics is typically discouraged as it distracts from the overall message, including elements that match your company’s brand tells users that any information within these dashboards can be trusted and is part of a greater corporate strategy.
- While overuse of color and graphics is typically discouraged as it distracts from the overall message, including elements that match your company’s brand tells users that any information within these dashboards can be trusted and is part of a greater corporate strategy.
- Point out the logo – using Image Show how Infographic Designer can create custom analytics
- As they say in Real Estate, location, location, location and this is true for dashboards as well. Always consider where you place objects within a dashboard or analysis.
- All the information that finds its way onto a dashboard should be important, but not all data is created equal: some data is more important than other data. The most important information can be divided into two categories: Information that is always important Information that is only important at the moment When you consider the entire collection of information that belongs on a dashboard, you should be able to prioritize it according to what is usually of greatest interest to viewers. For instance, a dashboard that serves the needs of a corporation's executives might display several categories of financial, sales, and personnel data. On the whole, however, the executives usually care about some key measures more than others. The other category of especially important information is that which is important only when it reveals something out of the ordinary. A measure that has fallen far behind its target, an opportunity that has just arisen and won't last for long, or an operational condition that demands immediate attention all fall into this category. These two categories of important information require different means of highlighting on a dashboard. The first category information that is always important can be emphasized using static means, but the second category information that is important only at the moment requires a dynamic means of emphasis. The location of data on the screen the layout is an aspect of a dashboard's appearance that doesn't, or at least shouldn't, change dynamically. This is true not only because it would be technically difficult to dynamically rearrange the placement of data on the screen, but also because after some use viewers will come to expect specific data to appear in specific locations, which is good because it helps them to scan the dashboard quickly. Because location is static, this is a variable that we can leverage to highlight information that is always important. Few aspects of visual design emphasize some data above the rest as effectively as its location. Figure 5-25 identifies the emphasizing effect that different regions of a dashboard provide. The top-left and center sections of the dashboard are the areas of greatest emphasis. The greater emphasis tied to the upper left is primarily due to the conventions of most western languages, which sequence words on a page from left to right and top to bottom. Contrary to the influence of reading conventions, however, the very center of the screen is also a region of strong emphasis, due to a more fundamental inclination of visual perception. I've found, however, that placing information in the center results in emphasis only when it is set apart somewhat from what surrounds it, such as through the use of white space. As much as possible, place the information that is always of great importance in the upper-left or center regions of the dashboard. Never waste this valuable real estate by placing a company logo or controls for navigation or data selection in these areas.
- It is important to always be consistent and avoid too much clutter – Let’s look at a scenario where we want to look at last 3 years sales in our 3 regions by category.
- Here is an analytic look at sales across our 3 region for the last 3 years It is all together in one chart, but I think we can all realize this is a lot of data and somewhat overwhelming.
- So let’s break it up into 3 different charts. This is much better, but it still has some issues,. There is some clutter, Like the legends and the titles
- So let’s take the legends and the title off and it looks much cleaner. However I really can’t compare Asia to North America,
- So this might be a good opportunity to use small multiples. However Power BI does not handle small multiples at this time. But there is a custom visual. The infographic designer we looked at early can address this need.
- So lets take a quick look at how I did this. Show how I removed the legend and adjusted titles Show how to create small multiples using Infographic Designer
- Most people are good at detecting patterns visually. The old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” rings especially true for data visualizations. It is about using the correct visual objects to quickly and efficiently communicate to the user. Let’s look at a couple examples
- What day are sales good? What day are they bad?
- Which areas of the store are making the sales?
- Let’s take a look at these visualizations Show the Calendar custom visual Show the store visual – go to svg setup and explain how to use it.
- I would strongly recommend Steven Few’s books if you are going to be building dashboards & visualizations.