The
Decomposition tree is the cool new AI
Powered visual in Power BI that can really help you explore and analyze your data.
We will show you step by step on how you can use the decomposition tree visual and
also share some useful tips along the way.
Hey, I'm Avi Singh, Microsoft MVP and best-selling Power BI author
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So let's keep going with the decomposition tree. Now as of right now
this is a preview feature that means before you can use it
you're gonna have to go to options preview features and just check that box once that's there
it's going to be available on Power BI. So let's just start from scratch.
What I'm gonna do is go to visualization here and you would see these three icons here
Three visualizations with the light bulb which signifies the AI
capability
Underneath under the hood, which is powering these visuals and the middle one here is the decomposition tree
I'm gonna just add it and and for now I'm just gonna use the whole screen real estate
By the way, of course
You saw well
As you can see in some of these other examples this official obviously can coexist with all the other visuals and so forth
but for now
We're just going to take the whole screen screen space a screen real estate here
folks you can grab this file and along with all of my other download files at the URL shown right here on the screen and
we're also gonna link it in the
Corner and again down in the description so you can click there as well the decomposition tree visual
I really like it because for one it's really simple to use and understand
There's just just these two options here analyze and explain
Buy analyze is something that you want to explore and in this case, we're gonna bake our sales measures
I'm just gonna drag sales there and right now it's not interesting Jim
You can't do anything of the usual here because you need the other set of fields now for this one
You know, you should add a few here
So basically you can add
anything by which either you think that you or
an end user of the report may want to analyze it explore this data by so I'm just gonna you know,
Of course, this is a sample data sets
I'm just gonna make a best guess but this you can work with your customer or your client or
Or just try different things out but you know, it doesn't hurt to add quite a few fields in there
So I'm gonna grab some from product so country category subcategory, maybe add color in there. Maybe grab some customer attributes. How about
their education and
Occupation let's let's kind of stick with that
Right, so and and the order of this is slightly important, but not that important and I'll tell you in just a second
So what we're gonna do right now is actually not gonna do anything in here and we're just going to publish this report
So I'm gonna click publish and I'll see you once. It's on for Viacom
All right
my report is published and I can pop over to power bi comm where I'm logged in and
that is my report and I want to show to you here because I want to
Emphasize that this capability to explore data and analyze it is now available to you
to all the users of this report
So if you publish it online and shared it with hundreds or thousands of users
They all can kind of come in come in here and kind of slice and dice this data as they see fit
All right, so they can come in here and I can say oh, okay. Cool
I want to see the breakdown by country and then well
maybe go to United Kingdom and look at it by category and within that maybe
Look at subcategory and then and and this is where the AI features come in and say well
I don't want to choose just show me the one that has the highest
Value and it does that and it indicates that by this lightbulb icon that AI
Selected it and it determined that you wanted the highest value and that it found
Based on the color and the color is red and I can keep going from there
I said well
What's the lowest value and then again?
It does it
Does it determines it by itself and you can see the life of Mike and it says well the lowest value was in
Occupation management, that's the breakdown, right? And and again the is pretty cool. You can kind of zoom in zoom out
And it scales really well. Alright, so you've seen the power of the decomposition tree visual
I'm just gonna share us some tips and tricks here. So one thing that I mentioned is that
The field weld is explained by is the order important or not
Well, it's not important in the sense that the order does not
Determine the you know, the way they explore the data they can they're free to choose any one of these selections, right? So
So they can go in here and select color to begin, right? So again, they don't have to
Go in that order. Alright, but the field in which it is you you
You order them is the way in which they're displayed in the drop-down menu
So you you know, you see some control to guide the user
So obviously, you know, you're gonna put what do you think are the more important ones at the top, right?
So again, they can choose any one they want but this gives them some guidance now another tip that I would share here
is that sometimes you might be dragging a lot of different fields in here and
When you're dragging for you, it's very clear that this is product category product color
But when the user clicks on this again the end user it may not be clear
Like is this customer country or what is this sales country?
And there what you can do is you can just rename some of these field
I'm just gonna rename one of them just to show you what you may do and you can say rename and
And you can be more descriptive and again, this doesn't rename the field itself
I mean you can see in the in the field value product
It's still called color, but it just renames it for this visual
and of course
What I would recommend is you rename some of these others as well
So you can say broader category customer education and so forth and that way when the customer is the end user is exploring it
It's gonna make more sense. So it's gonna say customer occupation customer education
Parodic color, right? So that's just one tip on using the decomposition tree visual
Let me show you a few other things around the decomposition tree. So now we talked about the EEI capability, right?
So where will you say? Well, I don't really care just show me kind of whichever
Field of this has the high value, right?
So whichever is the biggest contributor and again?
It determines that expands and you can keep going and you can say well high value look great move subcategory
What's the next highest value but the the EEI part here is that this selection is actually dynamic
So let me show you it's just show you what that means
So here I have done this basically high value and again, you can have a combination of high and low doesn't matter
But again, it's dynamic. So and it's gonna change
based on either the selection or
imagine if you refresh the data and now you have the current month's data of current year's data, and and now
Subcategory or color? You know this something is more important what let me just show you. Alright. So in this case instead of refresh
I'm just gonna select something here. So watch this order here color country education and
Well color country occupation notice how change that so overall its color country and then education is the highest factor
But in 2014
it was just at occupation and then notice changed back to education color country and
And so forth and if I choose a specific month notice Wow, it totally swapped
So now it's category color is the biggest factor here biggest breakdown here
so again
It just wanted to point out the the EEI capability that this thing is gonna be dynamic now talking about that
You can also if you want to control a specific
you know kind of a
Layout of that and you can also lock it down
so a example I can I can come in here country and and I can lock it down and
That way what's gonna happen is when I publish this visual and obviously as an author I can come in and unlock it
but
Anybody on power bi calm they would not be able to hit the X and delete it because it's been locked for them now
We've been using this for a pretty simple measure sales, which is just semi sales amount
But again, you can use this for any simple or complex measure
Imagine if you have new customers or lost customers or anything. That is really dear
Nearly an important metric or KPI for your business and you can use the decomposition tree
Absolutely kind of the user be able to click and explore it and in this case
Exactly figure out their oh well
We're on my new customers kind of coming from and just like any other power bi visuals
You expect this does it's fully interactive. I mean, not only can you expand and explore but you can highlight across highlight as well
So in this case, you know I can I can select a specific one
I can say yep
And and you can see that the rest of the report
Filters down to that right so I can I can be here and say hey show me by some the accessories
So on that whole path get selected
so this one right now basically has selected United Kingdom and clothing and of course if I had other
Paths in there then it selects United Kingdom clothing manual and it's showing me data for that
Decomposition tree also respects bookmarks that makes it pretty cool
So let me turn on bookmarks and you can see here
I can start from one bookmark to other so you can use this definitely if your
storytelling you're presenting and you know kind of based on that and the last
thing that I want to talk about is that one reason why I like the decomposition tree is that
In the beginning we did use the whole screen real estate because just because I wanted to make it easier to show to you
But I feel like this visual can work really well in a compact space as well
so if you're if I have a busy dashboard, you don't have that much space you can leave it on the side and just
you know instruct and train your users to expand to focus mode to analyze sales and and of course they you know,
They once they toggle the focus mode, then they can have it full screen. So again by default
It doesn't need to take up a lot of space
You can have it off in a corner and then have the user explore it in focus mode
So that was the decomposition tree
If you absolutely loved this visual then drop a comment below and let me know or maybe there's something in this region
Which you don't quite like doesn't quite work right then also
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