(upbeat music)
- Preparing your dashboard layout
is kind of a creative process.
We need to think about what information
and how it's presented
is going to resonate the most with stakeholders.
Now it's certainly possible
to change a layout down the track.
It's a little bit more tricky to do it that way.
So I tend to build the framework from the get-go.
What you're looking at
is the framework of the Power BI model.
It's already been connected to a data source.
Specifically, this model has been connected
to some e-commerce sales data.
And we can see that by clicking on the data icon
on the left-hand side of the screen,
and here it is.
Let's go back to the dashboard screen now,
by clicking on the first icon here called report.
Now let's go and click on insert from the menu options.
And then go ahead and click on text box.
We're going to give our dashboard a title.
The title that I'm going to use is Red 30 Sales Report.
Let's now resize the heading
to fit the width of the dashboard.
And I'm also going to make it
a little bit smaller as well.
With the text selected,
click on the center align icon from the font options.
Now let's increase the font to 44,
and with the text still selected,
let's go ahead and make it bold
by clicking on the B icon here.
Now, as you can see,
we've made this a little bit smaller
than we would have liked it.
So simply drag it to make it a little bit longer.
How about we now change the text color to white
simply by clicking the dropdown box here, next to font,
and let's change the color to white.
And finally, we should now change the background color
to black so we can still see the heading.
You'll find this option
to the right under visualizations.
All we need to do is click on background,
and click on the dropdown next to color and select black.
Finally, let's change the default page name
to something a little bit more meaningful,
such as summary report.
To do this simply double click on page one,
at the bottom of the screen,
and type over the existing text
with something a little bit more meaningful,
such as summary report, and hit enter on the keyboard.
Now we can always come back to this later on
and enhance it even further,
but this should give you an idea
of some of the practical tools that we can apply
to prepare a dashboard layout for stakeholders.
Selecting the most appropriate chart for your data
is more difficult than it might seem,
like a kid in a candy store,
sometimes there's just too much choice.
And certainly with Power BI,
there's an ever-growing suite of charting options.
So my strong advice is to just have a go,
knowing that it's dead easy to change a chart,
if it doesn't look quite right.
what you're looking at is the framework
of a power BI dashboard for an e-commerce business.
One of the most common charts that we can use
when it comes to e-commerce sales data is a line chart.
So let's go ahead and create one
by clicking on line chart under visualizations.
Now it doesn't look overly exciting at the moment, does it?
And that's just because we haven't
yet linked it to our data, so let's change that.
From the fields on the right-hand side,
let's drag the order date and drop it over axis.
Now at this point,
Power BI may apply a default date hierarchy.
If so, let's change it to order date
simply by clicking on the dropdown box next to order date.
And if date hierarchy is selected here,
simply change it to order date.
Now let's drag the order total
from the right hand side and drop it over values.
Looks pretty hot.
Well, whilst we're at it,
how about we resize the chart to take up a little bit
more of the dashboard viewing area?
Okay, now let's go ahead and add a waterfall chart.
A waterfall chart is a really good way
of looking at aggregate sales.
What we have to do is select waterfall chart
and from the fields on the right-hand side,
let's drag product category and drop it over category,
and then drag the quantity field and drop it over values.
This chart shows us the aggregate.
That is the total number of product sales from left to right
in order of the most to least sales volumes.
Now, as you can see,
there's an incredible range of charting options
available in power BI,
but this should give you just a taste for what's possible.
(upbeat music)