Customize Your Data Visualizations With Power BI
Customize Your Data Visualizations With Power BI
data visualizations
with Power BI
In this e-book, we want to show you how fast you can build
interactive dashboards that will allow you to easily analyze your
business data. We would like to present our idea for creating
reports that show the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
From this e-book, you will learn step by step how to build your
own interactive reports to analyze your business data, based on
a case study.
You will find three sections that will give you all the necessary
information allowing you to build your own reports based on the
data that you have – see the table of contents on the next page.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION TO POWER BI
• Power BI licensing 4
• Power BI connectors 5
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INTRODUCTION
TO POWER BI
Power BI licensing
Available versions of Power BI start with free licenses:
• Power BI Desktop – licensed by user, with free report
authoring and ad-hoc data exploration
• Power BI Free – licensed by user; quick, easy-to-use self-
service analytics for personal use.
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Power BI connectors
Power BI gives you the option to choose a connector which you can
find in the Get Data section in the top panel of Power BI Desktop.
The connectors on this list specify the main types of data sources
that you can use for your reports.
You can choose from data sources such as:
• File (Excel, JSON, XML, TEXT/CSV etc.)
• Database (Oracle, SQL Server, Access etc.)
• Azure (Azure SQL database, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure
Blob Storage etc.)
• Online services (SharePoint Online, Dynamics 365, Google
Analytics etc.)
• Other (Spark, R Script etc.).
This list contains a lot of different types of data, but not all of them.
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not what you’ll find here). I assume you’re a little familiar with this
technology, but at the same time, you’re not a hardcore analyst as
you’d probably know all these tips already.
areas of application of R script to Power BI. It will help you see your
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CASE STUDY
FROM PREDICA
The next step is to define a data source that you would like
to analyze. There are a lot of data sources that you can connect
to, but in this case we would like to show you our solution for
monitoring customer relationships and marketing activities. We
use a CRM system to store that data. In this chapter, we will explain
how to connect to it.
If you enrich this information with insights from Power BI, you can
create an all-in-one solution for managing your business processes.
With this guide on integrating Dynamics 365 with Power BI, you
can take your customer service to the next level.
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show you how fast you can change the way you analyze data from
Dynamics CRM using Power BI reports.
Tip
You can connect to your data source using one of three ways:
• Data import – the selected tables and columns are imported into
Power BI Desktop uses the imported data. You must refresh it,
which imports the full dataset again, to see any changes that
* This is the only option when you use a Dynamics CRM connection.
option to either import data from, or connect live to, the selected
data model. If you select import, you define a query against that
select to connect live, then there is no query defined, and the entire
as visuals are built, queries are sent to the external SSAS source.
* The only way to connect several data sources at the same time is
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Power BI blog
For the purposes of this tutorial, I have chosen the second way –
a connection to our CRM system which contains information on
the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns.
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3. At the top of this page, there is a Connect your apps to this instance
of Dynamics 365 option where you can get the Service Root URL.
This is the URL you want to use in the URL field after selecting Get
Data in Power BI.
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You can use one of the six available methods for authentication,
but at Predica, we usually use authentication with an organizational
account through OAuth2. If you want to know more about available
authentication methods and which one you should choose, contact
our subject matter expert Tomasz Onyszko.
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When you analyze data from Dynamics 365, you will encounter the
problem of data transformation. You will need to choose entities
appropriate for your problem analysis. Let me give you a little hint
about the ones you should focus on. For marketing analysis, the
entities you should analyze are:
Lead
Contact
Opportunity
Active Campaign
Campaign Reach
Social Interactions
Likes
Post Clicks
Campaign Cost
User
You should be able to create and gather useful insights from your
Dynamics data based on these entities. Now, let’s see how you
can use them to effortlessly and intimately analyze marketing
information.
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Power BI and Dynamics 365 run on the same O365 account, thanks
to OAuth2 authentication. It is, therefore, possible to nest reports
without providing additional credentials. Moreover, low-level
security and other functionalities are also migrated and enforced
in nested reports.
Tip
Before you start, you should also enable the possibility of nesting
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In steps:
• Enable Power BI tiles in Dynamics 365
• Select Power BI from the grid and select tiles to embed from the
drop-down list.
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PRACTICAL TIPS
FOR POWER BI REPORTS
Also, don’t fear the old-school and “ugly” tables – they are still the
best way to present raw data, which is sometimes all you really
need (and what you keep using Excel for!). For example, I try to
avoid pie charts and treemaps for a very simple reason – you
cannot see the difference between pie fields which have similar
values.
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The next report shows reach volume per campaign after changing
the visualization method from a pie chart to columns. Notice how
easily we can see the difference in the reach of our campaigns and
immediately notice the winner:
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4. Line is usually best for time series when you need to compare
multiple series of data, but for single bars it works just as well.
Using a chart as in the picture below, you can determine the trends
and seasonality, as well as check when your marketing activities
were the most popular.
• Facebook likes
and in line:
• Campaign reach
The below graph gives us the opportunity to present data on one
diagram using two scales:
Image 15. Line and clustered column chart of social media profitability
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But what might not be obvious at first sight, is that you can
actually use three ways of filtering and connecting data to make
your analysis experience better and easier. Let’s consider a project
management example, where you’re interested in seeing the
time reported by people (top bar in the below example) and time
reported each month (the bottom bar), where you can see the
different behaviours the interactions provide:
1. None. No filtering happens between elements. In the example
– clicking on the bar in the top chart does not influence data
displayed on the bottom:
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Filter. When you click on one of the positions on the left panel
filter, it will display just the relevant data. As you can see, all of the
charts and metrics on this page show only campaigns in which
Tomasz Onyszko participated as an expert.
So, depending on the context in which you are viewing your data,
it may have a significant difference to what relationship you will
select. Especially, when there’s a lot of data elements, it might
greatly influence the ease of use of the report, especially for not
advanced users (which we usually create such tools for).
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Tip #3: Divide and conquer (or slicing and dicing) – filters
The most basic concept of data visualization, yet you might still be
surprised by how many filtering possibilities there are in Power BI
reports – there are 5 obvious ones.
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Using this filter however helps you to easily search the information
that will be interesting to you. In our example, you can choose
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Notice: if you click the bar on the top chart you filter out everything
else.
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Obviously, you can create different reports for each of them, but
then you will end up managing and supporting a large number of
such cases. Alternatively, you can be clever and design a report
in a way that means it can be used by both. And this is where
hierarchies come in handy.
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Since it’s easy and quick to create reports in Power BI, you may
be tempted to create many of them, just because you can. But
think of the poor users who will be working with these reports
and how they can get confused when they get tons of reports or
pages showing similar things…
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But that’s the whole point – the time you spend in Power BI should
be spent on trying to fit and visualize the information in that space,
so that it is clear and easy to digest by potential users at first sight.
This is particularly important when you consider that Power BI has
two display areas:
• Dashboard – the primary point where users go to, but with
no filtering or interactions. Dashboard tiles are just links to
underlying reports and their purpose is to present the current
status of things
• Reports – analytical spaces with all interactive capabilities.
Their purpose is to dig into data details to understand the
reasons why certain things happen.
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You can specify your own set of colors for the report. I recommend
you create your Custom Theme. Full instructions on how to build
your own custom theme can be found here.
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Make sure that your report is ready for presenting data to the
company. If you customize it properly, it will certainly be used
during business meetings, and it will take less time to create
a presentation.
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KEY TAKEAWAYS
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Interested?
Contact us
[email protected]
www.predica.pl