Power BI Report Card Visual - Snack 14

That little table we made is nice.  It would be better if it were a little more reactive to changing conditions in the report.

What does that mean, anyway?

As mentioned previously, Power BI is not meant to simply display plain old ordinary data in the same plain old ordinary way that Excel does it.  What would be the point of that?  It is meant to offer opportunities for manipulation, interactivity, and self-service analysis.

Let's jump into EDIT mode on our report and I will show you what I mean.

1. Select the table visualization that we created last time.
2. Right-Click
1. Copy
2. Copy visual
3. On the keyboard <CTRL>+V
1. A copy of the table should appear
4. Grab the new visual and drag it out of the way somewhere but keep it selected.
5. In the Visualizations pane,
1. Click on "Card," which looks like a little box with a "1 2 3" inside.
2. It should change your table to plain white box with 127.93M inside.
6. File -> Save

So, what is this showing?

Look over in the Visualizations and see that there is only one item in your Fields section.  It should be displaying the same number as "Sum of Gross Sales," though abbreviated.

Most folks looking at this sort of thing are probably not interested in gross sales though.  Let's go ahead and change to what everyone really cares about, profit!

Make sure you still have that visual selected, and ...

Drag and drop the [Profit] field from the Data pane into the Fields section of the Visualizations pane.

We started off saying something interactivity though.

Click each of the years in your table in turn now.  

The card visual will change to match your selection.

We can look simply at sales as a table, with profit independent of that in another visual.

This enables me to drop [Profit] out of that table now, since we have it showing up somewhere else.

If you want, if you still have the visual selected, you can visit the "Format visual" tab under the Visualizations pane and change the look and feel to fit your taste.

Otherwise, that is all we have today!  I am hoping to get these out a little earlier in the day on Friday, since it has become more of the catch-up-and-learn-things day for the workforce.

Hold on a minute!!!

There is some sort of little triangle with an exclamation point above the card!  

That doesn't look good.

It is not doing any damage.  It is because we copied the table visual to create another visual.

If you hover over that icon, it will tell you what is going on. 

This is a bug Microsoft recently introduced that is a super annoying.  It seems that they failed to recognize that this copy/paste of visuals happens all the time.  I mean, who wants build everything from scratch?  

Looks like you are going to get to "Format visual" anyway.

To fix that little issue, go over to the Visualizations pane and switch to "Format visual."  That is the one with the paintbrush icon over the bars.  Change your "Style presets" to "Default."  It goes away.  The option for "Style presets" go away too.  

Ain't that fancy?   

Don't forget to SAVE one more time.

Oh, and going forward, the image attached will be my final screen.