Original subtitles

Next up we're going to talk about power be-I report formatting options.

Now this is all about customizing the look and feel of your visuals.

Fact is there are a ton of different formatting options and they vary pretty drastically between chart

types.

So rather than show you every single option for every chart type which wouldn't be a very effective

use of time.

I'm going to demonstrate what some of these sets of formatting options look like for different types

of charts.

And then we're going to go into power be-I and practice customizing the format for our stacked bar chart.

So here we have three very different types of visuals.

We've got a combo chart on the left which is a line and column.

We've got a matrix visual in the center and a donut chart on the right.

Now looking at formatting options for the line and column combo chart you've got a number of different

categories there.

General Legende formatting x and y axis data colors and labels shapes plot area titled background walk

aspect and border and within each of those you have additional options.

So just within the x axis formatting options for instance you can change the type the scale type.

You can fix a starting or ending value update the color text size font and display mode.

So these menus are packed with options and those options like everything else dynamically update based

on what you're working with.

Now for The Matrix view you'll see a slightly different set of options here.

And you've got Matrix style options great options column and row headers subtotals grand totals conditional

formats so that conditional formatting field is one of the more interesting ones here that allows you

to do things like add color backgrounds or change the font color or add data bars dynamically to draw

attention to higher or lower values as a visual indicator.

Similar to how we used color saturation option in her bar chart and then looking at donut chart options.

Again it's got its own totally different set of options here and drilling into some of these you've

got detail labels where you can change the style and text and font settings and then a title which you

can align and customize as you see fit.

So again thousands and thousands and thousands of different combinations of formatting rules you could

apply.

But the good news is that a passerby is default styles and formats are actually pretty thoughtful and

polished more so than with other tools that I've used in the past.

And B it's all extremely user friendly.

So by simply poking around and testing out different combinations and variations you pretty quickly

get a grasp on what these options mean and how they all work.

So with that let's head back into power VI and we're going to explore some of the formatting options

for the bar chart that we've added.

Ok we're back on our canvas.

You'll note that when I don't have the chart selected I don't see my options here for either fields

or formatting.

So make sure that you select the chart that you're interested in and now you'll see those fields populate

this time we're interested in the second tab of this pain called format.

And as you can see we've got all of these categories of options each of which include sub options for

us to customize the look and feel of this chart.

So I'm going to quickly pass through each of these maybe touch upon a couple of the key concepts but

I'd recommend that you take some time to explore these menus on your own as well.

So General basically this is about height weight positioning.

Typically won't really touch the general options.

Y-axis has a bunch of options here.

So this is everything related to the Y axis of our chart.

I'm going to drag it closer just so that side by side so you can turn the entire axis on and off.

First and foremost and when you turn it off obviously those options are now inactive.

But let's keep the Y-axis because I want to see those titles those labels for each subcategory.

You can change it from the left side to the right.

You change the color text size.

Even the font family.

And if we expand this out a bit it can read minimum category with really just give it a shot and see

what happens.

Just changes the actual width in this case almost like the height of each bar.

Maximum size changes kind of the length of each bar and then Inner padding is if you don't want that

blank space between bars.

You can eliminate that entirely.

Let's make this a little bit bigger.

And the last option here on the y axis is the title.

So an Access title assigned to your Y.

Keep that off.

So we've made some changes and now we've changed our mind and we actually don't like the updates we

made every one of these menus has a yellow revert to default option on the bottom.

And when you click it takes me right back to where I started.

Really helpful feature there.

So there's a Y-axis options very similar tools for the x axis.

So now I'm dealing with this horizontal axis down at the bottom some certain chart types will have different

scales.

In this case it's just linear.

The only option.

Start and End will default to auto.

But these basically say do you want to customize the minimum and maximum values along that axis.

So you could say sure instead of 10000.

Let's have it go all the way to 30000.

And it essentially shrinks these bars down because my max is now three times larger and simply delete

that to go back to auto.

And again we've got color text font display the units in different ways.

Thousands millions decimal places turn the X-axis title on and off turn the grid lines on and off change

the grid line style.

In this case maybe we go dasht and change them a little bit darker.

Like so those are our x axis options now.

Data colors you can see because we have a color saturation applied here.

It gives us the option to customize this gradient that we're looking at here diverging basically just

adds a third center point.

You can see how it makes the middle values kind of this light almost white color.

We could customize this if we choose and say let's make the minimum red center maybe yellow.

And the maximum this kind of greenish blue is like a rainbow and then say OK never mind we don't want

that.

Let's revert to default and you're back to where you started data labels.

This might be helpful here.

So you can activate the labels and you'll see them populate here in your chart.

It's changed that color to make them a little bit lighter.

It's got one more darker than that.

There you go.

And then the same number tools display units decimal places you can position them inside of the bars

outside automatic change how they react to overflow when the charts resized and then change the text

size font and background will basically just put a little bar behind it.

So I think this is good.

They're light.

They're very subtle but they're there if you need them to go one size up to.

And those are the data label options they're plot area.

Not much to do here.

You can add an image behind that chart.

Since there's nothing behind it transparency is not going to do anything.

Chart title.

This is one that I do want to update here because it defaults auto populates based on the fields you've

dragged in.

So right now the title is kind of awkward.

It's total orders total revenue and total profit by subcategory name.

So let's simplify that a little bit because we're really just focusing on total orders by subcategory

category.

There we go.

And there you go updated the title and what I'd like to do can out a background and a font color so

I'm going to and kind of a darker gray and the light font color.

Kind of make that title pop a little bit.

Well line the title in the center and let's make it bigger.

To a size 12.

And again you can change font family.

You can follow along exactly how I'm doing this.

Or you can format using your own style totally up to you.

So those are the title changes that I'd like to make.

Background.

You can turn on or off just sets basically a background color like so and a level of transparency.

This case I don't want the background lock aspect ratio.

This just says when you resize the chart do you want to keep the exact proportions.

So this fixes the proportions when that's off.

Now you can kind of resize however you want.

And then our last option here is the border on or off.

That one's a simple one.

So let's keep the border off unless you choose to keep it totally up to you.

So that was a lot of options.

A lot of formatting tools but we've made a couple of tweaks here.

We've added data labels we tweaked or X grid lines make made them dasht then updated our title here

as well.

So again you'll come across some other formatting options.

When you start dealing with other types of visuals but for the most part they're as simple as those

ones that we just walk through.

So there you have it chart formatting options.