Original subtitles

Instructor: One of Power BI's biggest

and arguably most impactful updates of 2023

was the new card visual.

Now, the new card was introduced in preview in June 2023,

and the release was pretty big.

It gave you the ability to add

and format multiple fields within a single card visual

so that you could turn individual cards like this

into a single native visual like this.

It also added some brand new functionality like tool tips

and drill throughs along with new styling

and layout options, plus the addition of things like images

and accent bars.

So that was pretty great.

But in the November 2023 update,

they added some brand new functionality to these new cards,

specifically reference labels.

So reference labels allow you to build cards like this,

which can include additional metrics

like last month, forecast, et cetera.

You can add detail text to call out things like percent

or volume change

and add conditional formatting to draw attention to positive

or negative trends.

So in this demo, I'm gonna show you

how you can make the most of these new card visuals

and as a bonus, I'll also show you

how to use scalable vector graphics, or SVGs,

with custom embedded visuals like this sparkline here.

So here we're looking at our AdventureWorks report,

and you remember with these cards at the top

of our exec dashboard, we kind of had to do this manually.

We added four separate card visuals.

We added shapes for the background,

we grouped it all together.

So the first thing I wanna show you

is how the new card visual

can really help replicate something like this.

So I'm gonna add a new tab here.

I'm gonna call it New Card Demo.

And let's go ahead and insert a new card visual.

It looks just like the old card visual,

except has a lightning bolt in preview mode.

If you don't see this, head to your options.

Make sure to check that box in the preview settings

for the new card visual.

So go ahead and drop that onto the canvas,

stretch it out a little bit.

In this case, we're just gonna drop the fields

that we need into the data pane.

And let's go ahead

and just replicate what we had in that exec dashboard view.

So we had total revenue, we had total profits,

we had total orders,

and we had return rates.

And check it out.

Already we've got all four

of those metrics contained within one single visual

instead of four.

Now let's talk about

how we can start formatting this visual.

I'm gonna fire up my formatting pane here

and we're gonna go through all of these different options.

Don't really need to do anything with size and style,

don't need a visual level title.

We're gonna go into shape.

One thing I do like to do for a lot

of my cards is use the rounded rectangle

and I like to do something like a 10% rounded corner.

I think that looks pretty nice.

And if we go to layout, we can change things like alignment

and we can add a little bit of buffer

or space between the cards.

In this case, let's go ahead with a 20 pixel buffer.

Next up, we can drill into our callout values

and actually change the formatting of these numbers.

And with most of these formatting menus,

you'll have the option to apply universal changes to all

of the series, or you can make specific changes

to individual series.

So there are a few updates that I wanna make

to everything like the font.

Let's go Segoe UI, do size 40 in bold

and we're gonna use my favorite blue.

And yes, I have memorized the hex code.

It's 20E2D7 like so.

And by default, let's show one decimal place.

So that looks pretty good.

Suppose I wanted a second decimal place

for a metric like return rate.

In that case, I would scroll up,

select that specific series, and then go back down

and add the second decimal just to that field.

We can also edit the labels as well.

So let's go ahead back to all series,

drill into our label formatting options.

Let's go Segoe UI, maybe 11 points.

And I'm gonna make these white

'cause I'm gonna do a dark gray fill

in the background of these cards.

You can change the position as well.

You can do text wrap, all sorts of stuff there.

But that's all I need to do as far

as callout value formatting is concerned.

Now we're gonna skip over reference labels.

We're gonna talk about that in a bit.

We'll add images in just a bit as well.

But the card option, this is where I can apply some kind

of general styling to each of these four cards.

So you can do custom padding or default.

You can add or modify the background.

In this case, I like a nice dark gray background.

And then you've got some other features here.

Don't really need a border if we've got the background fill.

You can do crazy things with shadows or glows.

Don't really need to deal with that right now.

But I do like the accent bar here.

So you can do the accent bar on the left,

top, bottom, or right.

Let's give it that bright blue color.

In this case, you can see it pop in the left.

I'm just gonna add a little bit of width here, maybe four

or five pixels, something kind of subtle like so.

Now, last thing I wanna do is add some small images

or icons so I can head into images, which is a new feature

of these new cards and I can apply some universal settings

to how I wanna handle these images.

Let's go ahead and activate it.

And by default, let's put these to the left

of our label text here.

We'll put six pixels of space,

and I want my images to be pretty small, about 30 pixels.

This is probably one of those things

that's gonna take some trial and error

depending on the image sizes that you're using.

But I know that 30 works pretty well for mine.

So once we've got those universal settings,

I can drill into each individual setting

and I can browse for an image file.

So here's a revenue icon in white

with a transparent background.

That looks pretty good.

Go into profit, browse for that icon,

head into orders.

There we go.

And finally, return rates.

So there you have it.

So much simpler to be working with one single visual

that captures all four of these metrics.

So that's level one stuff.

Now let's take it up a notch to level two

and start seeing

how these brand new reference labels actually work.

So to do that, I'm gonna copy

and paste that card visual we just created.

And instead of going through the same process for all four

of these metrics, I'm gonna simplify things for the demo

and just focus on one for now.

So just revenue

and let's resize things a little bit like so.

And basically, what I wanna do here

is recreate something like we had here

in our executive dashboard with our revenue order

and return KPI cards, which remember,

instead of showing the kind of top line aggregate totals,

in this case, we're looking at the current month

and comparing it against the previous month

with a percent change.

So let's jump back in.

First thing I'm gonna do is change the filter context here

so that we're only looking at the current month of data.

Let's go ahead and drill into our filter pane.

And we're gonna need that start of month field.

I'm gonna add a visual level filter with a top N,

we're gonna show the top one month

based on the latest month.

That's gonna give me a total revenue of 1.8.

If we go back into formatting, callout values,

we can add a second decimal place.

Now, when you're dealing with reference labels,

the rounded rectangle style doesn't really work so well.

So let's go back into our options here, go into shape,

and I'm gonna change this back to a standard rectangle.

And now let's talk about what these reference labels

are all about.

First things first, I'm gonna add some universal formats

and we're gonna turn on things like a divider line.

That's gonna create a visual separation between my KPI value

and the reference labels beneath it.

Let's make that a bright blue with a width of two

and the background fill where our reference labels will be,

I want that to be just kind of a standard white,

and it's kind of tough.

I can't see what's changing

because I don't have any reference labels yet.

But as soon as I add one, you'll see what those formats

that it just applied actually look like.

So let's select a series, total revenue,

and let's add a label.

So what measure can we pull in that we want to display here

that would give us some helpful context

around this month's revenue?

Well, maybe the previous month's revenue.

Let's go ahead and select that and boom, it's dropped it in.

Now what I love about this

is that we can format every single component of this.

So we can select that label, previous month revenue,

we can customize the title.

Let's make it a little bit simpler, last month.

And we can also format just the value component

of that label as well in here.

Can make it bold, for instance.

And instead of choosing auto display units,

which rolled it up to the 2M that we see here,

can choose none and show the actual entire value.

Now, we can go ahead and add additional fields here as well.

So we can add a second label.

This time, maybe we want something like the revenue target

that adds another line right beneath our old label.

And again, we could do some formatting here.

For the new label revenue target, let's do custom

just call it Target.

And for the value, same story here, we can make it bold

and no display units.

So now we can see that our current month revenue is 1.83.

Last month, we were about 1.77.

Our target was 1.945.

We can add one more layer

of detail here using the detail option that we can assign

to any individual label.

So right now, we're looking at the revenue target label

and what kind of additional detail could we provide

around that target?

If you remember, we had a measure

that was called Revenue Target Gap.

Essentially, the difference

between current month revenue and the target.

So if we select that as our detail,

now we can see that our target was 1.945 million

and we fell short by about 118,000, but we're not done.

One thing that I love is that there are so many places

you can apply conditional formatting.

Any time you see that FX icon,

it means that you can get a little bit more fancy

and conditionally format things like fonts or fills

or background colors, even accent bars.

So in this case, let's add some conditional formatting

to the color of the font for that detail here.

And what we're gonna do is a rule-based format

and basically say, hey,

if that revenue target gap is negative, right?

If it's greater than or equal to the minimum value

and less than zero, right?

If it's a negative value, let's show that with a red font.

Otherwise, if it's greater than or equal to zero

and less than or equal to the maximum value, then you know,

maybe we choose a green here

or maybe we just show it with a dark gray.

Press OK.

And now check it out.

That gap figure changed to red

because our current month revenue fell short of the target.

Pretty amazing stuff that we're able

to produce in really just the matter of a few minutes.

But if you wanna get even fancier,

if you wanna get even more advanced,

the first thing I wanna show you

is how we can take these detail labels

and add things like icons or graphics using DAX measures

and UNICHAR functions.

So check this out, I'm gonna head to my data view.

And remember, we've got that revenue target gap measure.

I'm gonna add a new measure here,

and I'm gonna call this revenue target gap with arrow,

and I'm gonna paste some code here

and then explain it so that you don't have

to see me type it all out bit by bit.

So what we see here is initially,

we're creating three variables,

an uparrow, a downarrow, and revenuegap.

Now uparrow and downarrow

are both defined using the UNICHAR function,

which pulls in a UNICHAR code like the ones

that you see here, and essentially embeds an icon

and treats it like a character that you can concatenate

with other measures or other text strings.

Now, you can look up UNICHAR tables to figure out

how to find these codes for different symbols or icons,

but I'm using code for an uparrow that I like,

which is 129129,

and a basic downarrow, which is 129131.

And our revenuegap variable

is just our revenue target gap measure.

Now, in the return component of our measure,

we can add some conditional logic

and basically just say if that revenuegap is negative,

if we fell short of our target,

then I want to return the revenuegap value

with a space and the downarrow.

Otherwise show me the revenuegap with an uparrow.

Because we're concatenating text and characters here,

this measure will be formatted as a string.

So to preserve the currency format that I want,

what I'm doing is rounding the result of that measure

to zero places, and then I'm wrapping that

in a format function to display it as a currency format.

So let's go ahead and save that new measure.

And now all we need to do is go back to our visual,

head to the formatting pane, go back to reference labels,

all the way down to detail.

And now instead of revenue target gap,

we're gonna use revenue target gap with arrows

and check it out.

We get that same value, 118,000

with that UNICHAR down arrow as well.

Now you might be saying, all right, Chris, that's cool,

but what about those awesome sparklines that we could add

with the native KPI cards?

How could we do something like that?

Well, you can do that with SVGs.

Those are scalable vector graphics.

And there are a few things

that are really awesome about SVGs.

Number one, you can resize them to any size

or dimensions without losing quality.

They're supported by virtually every single browser.

And the best part, you can use XML code

to define different elements of an SVG, like the color,

shape, size, position, and more.

So our goal here is to use a custom SVG

to embed a sparkline similar to those existing KPI cards,

but much, much cooler.

So let's go ahead and start by copying

and pasting this existing visual.

And similar story here.

I'm just gonna demo with the revenue field.

I don't need to do this four separate times.

And drag it over here like so.

Now, if you're really skilled with XML

and you're familiar with SVGs,

you can write this code from scratch.

I'm not.

So what I do is find great templates online

and then modify them to suit my needs.

So here's one amazing site

where you can find some really cool templates.

It's called kerrykolosko.com.

And if you head to this website,

you can drill into templates

and you'll find SVG templates here.

And the one that I'm gonna use

is the gradient area sparkline with last point.

So what we can do here is scroll down

and you'll see all of this code

which defines that SVG visual.

You can click the clipboard to copy it

and let's head back to Power BI

and add this to a brand new measure.

So let's go to data, add a new measure,

and I'm just gonna go ahead and paste all that code in.

You can see it looks really scary.

We've got a bunch of errors,

but don't worry, with a little bit of deductive reasoning,

we can modify this to do exactly what we need.

So let's go ahead and change the measure title

to something like Revenue Sparkline.

Now, there're a couple updates that I need to make.

If you scroll through, you'll see a few places

where date fields are referenced from a financials table.

Obviously, we don't have a financials table in our model.

This is just a placeholder.

And we see a measure here called Sum of Gross Sales

that we'll need to swap in

for our total revenue measure as well.

So let's do our dates first.

And instead of financials[Date], I want this sparkline

to be at the monthly level.

So I'm gonna go to our calendar lookup

and find the start of month field.

And now I'm just gonna copy and paste that,

replace every instance that I can find

of financials[Date].

And you can see I've got a financials table reference here,

which will need to be updated with calendar lookup.

And now let's do the same thing with this measure.

Gonna change from sum gross sales to total revenue.

And there are a few instances where I'll need to copy

and paste that measure.

So I think I've gotten all

of the instances accounted for here.

And just to be clear, I really have no idea what a lot

of this code is doing,

especially this XML custom format stuff here at the end.

But it's pretty clear what fields we need to swap in

to customize this to suit our needs.

So let's go ahead and press enter here.

That's gonna save our measure.

And now let's go back to our visual, open up formatting,

head to images, and let's go to total revenue.

Get rid of that JPEG that we added.

And now instead of image, we're gonna use image URL

and click that function icon.

We're gonna use the field value format style

and base it on that measure we just created.

So let's press OK.

You can see a tiny 30 pixel image got added here

to the left of our label.

That's a good start, but obviously,

we need to do a little bit of format tweaking here.

So let's change our universal settings to bump this up

to like 200.

And instead of left of text, let's put it below the text,

do a little resizing, and that's looking pretty good.

The only thing I don't like is this kind of weird blue

and the fade to gray.

So let's go back to measures.

We'll search for that sparkline measure.

Now what I'm gonna do is look for these hex codes

and I'm gonna replace them with the 20E2D7,

and I'm gonna use a hex code for dark gray

to match the background, which is 333333.

So I'm gonna go through

and make those updates here, 20E2D7,

and instead of white, I'm gonna use another hex code.

Looks like I need to include the %23 for compatibility.

Then 333333.

For these stop-colors, I want that blue, E2D7.

And this will generally be a trial and error exercise.

You might make a few changes, save the measure,

see how it impacts the visual,

then go back and make some more.

That's kind of what I did here to realize

that these were the exact places

that I would need to make these changes.

So I think those hex code updates look good.

Last thing I wanna do

is just drop the stroke width down a little bit

from three to two for the line

and also for that last point.

And let's just scroll up, make sure things look good.

It looks like we need a hash

on that stop-color hex code right there.

And let's go ahead and press enter

and see how that impacted our visual.

So boom, check it out.

There is our beautifully formatted sparkline.

So there you have it.

That's our crash course in Power BI's brand new card visual.

Hope you found it helpful.

Hope you learned a thing or two,

and I will see you in the next one.