Create Dashboards With PowerBI

Personalize Your Dashboard With Visual Elements 

Your project meeting with Jane is coming up: you need to show her a project she’ll like!

In this chapter, you’ll see how to personalize your dashboard, setting up several pages that respond to your user stories:

• A Home page with instructions for use.

• A Mortgage Application page for analysis indicators 

• A Branch Performance page for analyzing branch performance. 

• A Customer Indicators page to monitor the make-up of the borrower portfolio and to zoom in on individual borrowers’ (or potential borrowers’) profiles.

To create additional pages in your Power BI report, all you have to do is click on the “+” button underneath the canvas: 

Personalize Your Page

Let’s take a look at how you can personalize your pages.

These are the options available for personalization:

Information on the Page

• Change the page name.

• Create a shortcut to make it easy to search using the Q&A box (we’ll look at this later).

Page Size

• Change the page format (16:9, 4:3, etc.)

Page Background

• Change the background color. 

• Add a background image.

Vertical Alignment

• Align your canvas at the top or center of the screen. 

Wallpaper

• Add a wallpaper color behind the page. 

Personalize Your Filters

You can also personalize your filters to the right of your screen.

Here are your options:

Filter Pane

• Add a background color to the filter pane. 

• Change the font.

• Change border size and color. 

Filter Cards

• Add a background color to your filter cards: you can choose to apply a different color to active filters, which can be highly visually effective. 

• Change the font.

• Change border size and color.

Add Other Visual Elements

Improve the Formatting

You can, of course, change how your graphs are formatted. That’s what we’re going to look at here. First of all, I’m going to ask you to create a few additional graphs.

Over to You!

Make sure you’ve imported all of the tabs from the Excel file Jane provided you (Branches, Down Payment, Mortgage, Family Circumstances, and Professional Situation).

Visualization 4 – Home Page

On your home page, do the following: 

1. Add the Global Bank logo at the top right of the screen and a background if you wish.

   

2. Place a text box in the middle of your canvas and write instructions for your users (e.g. a description of the pages on your report, or the helpdesk email address in case there are any questions or problems with the dashboard). 

Visualization 5 – User Story 9: Global Bank wants to visualize the relative performance of branches by customer volume 

On your Branch Performance page, create the following visualizations: 

1. Add a simple map visualization to your page. 

2. Add the location of the branches in the Location field. 

3. Under Legend, add the branch numbers.

4. Under Size, add the Client Number column from your Mortgage table. 

The size of the bubbles that represent the branches should now change according to the number of customers, using automatic aggregation.

You’ll note that your variable in the Size field is now called “Number of customer numbers”. Power BI tallies the number of customers by agency all on its own to calculate the bubble size. 

Visualization 6 – User Story 9: Global Bank wants to visualize the number of mortgage applications received by each branch 

1. Add a line chart with several lines. 

2. In Fields, add the branch location. 

3. Add mortgage numbers.

You’ll see that mortgage numbers aggregate by default as the total mortgage applications received by the branches.

Visualization 7 – User Story 9: Global Bank wants to visualize the relative performance of its branches in terms of the quality of mortgage applications received 

1. Add a stacked-column-chart visualization to the page. Here you want to visualize the approval rate for mortgage applications by agency. 

2. Add the branch number to the Axis and add your Approved column to the Legend field. 

3. Add the number of mortgages to Values. 

Visualization 8 – User Story 9: Global Bank wants to visualize the annual ranking of its branches in terms of the number of mortgage applications received 

1. Add a ribbon-chart visualization to your page. With this, we can visualize the relative performance of the branches as a ranking according to mortgage applications received from customers. 

2. Add the application date to Axis, the branch number to Legend, and in Values the number of mortgages.

Be sure to select the number aggregation in the Values field.

Set Up Alerts on Your Visualizations 

Branch managers want to be alerted to any real-estate transactions over $250,000 (user story 4). To do this, you’re going to create a visualization for pending mortgage applications that are yet to be processed (user story 1), and add a visual alert.

Visualization 9 – User Stories 1 and 4

1. Add a table visualization on the mortgage application page.

2. Add the application dates and transaction amount to this in the Value field.

And you’re ready to go!

In the next video, you’ll see how to set up a visual alert on the table for any real-estate transactions over the threshold of $250,000.

Let’s Recap!

• Personalize the pages of your report by adding shapes (boxes for explanatory text, buttons, etc.) to make it easier for your users. 

• With the page formatting options, you can add logos, backgrounds, and colors so that your report matches your client’s brand. 

• Use graph formatting to ensure you’ve used legible fonts and clear titles. 

• Using conditional formatting, you can go even further and create visual alerts for your users. 

In the next chapter, you’ll see the different features that let you navigate around your dashboard!