The Importance of Cohesive Design in your Power BI Reports and Dashboards

Include custom designs in your Power BI reports and dashboards

In this video, you’ll learn to create well-designed Power BI reports and dashboards, using cohesive design applied across all elements on a page. You’ll also learn tips to match visual formatting, and use background elements and shapes to make your Power BI products pop.

Hi, this is Matt with Playfair+. Do you ever feel like your reports are just not connected enough? To make them really pop, sometimes you need to bring in visual elements, such as a full background or additional colors to connect the images together, connect the visualizations together. In this tutorial, we’re going to walk through what it takes to move from a basic report to a fully connected professionalized report that looks like a full dashboard, so let’s dive in.

Alright, so we’ve built some things. We’ve got that bar chart, line chart, we’ve got a scatter plot. We can create some cards. I think that’ll be a good thing to do. And then we’ve done some onscreen slicers. Alright. But it doesn’t really, it doesn’t really knock my socks off. It’s, it looks like it’s just a bunch of disparate pieces thrown together.

How do we go from that, all the way to a completed looking dashboard? It’s connected. It looks interactive. It definitely has all the pieces together that we want to look at. Well. There’s a couple ways. The first one that I want to talk through, is using an image background to just drop in and then layer your visualizations on top of. 

At Playfair Data, we do a lot of work in Figma. We have really talented designers on staff that create our background images for us. And they give us that framework, that wireframe, to put our information on top of, to create a very professional-looking, finished product. This background was actually done, by Conor, one of our designers.

And, that background provides space for a header, title, allows the user to know exactly what they’re looking at right off the top. This is the AdventureWorks Sales Dashboard. It’s for this specific training, and then each of the individual sections has background information already in it. 

KPI cards, it says, this is what we’re looking at, our slicer options. Here’s what we’re doing. The sales by country, sales by category, you know, sales and profit, and then having that deep dive of a matrix, it’s all layered in there. So. Let’s go and create a new page and we’ll start building things out for here. So, let’s go back over and we’ll do a new page.

And what we’re going to do is we’re going to insert an image. And let’s see here. I’m going to go and look at my downloads. Hopefully it’s near the top. Alright, so we have our training template, training dashboard. I think I want the template, v2. And you can see all I did was drop this image in and here it is.

So if I resize it, and I will drag it all the way to the size. So if you’ve downloaded this background, you can go ahead and do the same thing right now. I’m going to go ahead and look at the properties here. 720 by 1280. Position: 0, 0. Padding. Okay. Power BI, by default, brings in some padding.

This is great because it will automatically space out your images. However, this particular image was designed to fit perfectly in our 16:9 background. So I want to remove all the padding from this and make sure it fills the entire screen. I don’t want to publish a report and then see that I’ve missed some pixels. I missed some space I could cram more information into. I want to make sure that my padding is set to zero across the board. 

So, okay. And now it’s going to be straightforward. I’m going to take my bar chart image that we’ve created and I’m going to Ctrl-C copy it, and I’m going to go ahead and Ctrl-V paste it.

I’m going to resize it down so that it fits inside what we’re looking at. And I do need to make some changes. We already have a title in the background, so let’s go ahead and remove that title. We don’t need it anymore. And we’re going to go ahead and fit our sales by category into our background.

And then our line chart was sales by country. So let’s go ahead and grab this and we’re going to go, and I should really rename this to dashboard. We’re going to drop our sales by country visualization into our new dashboard.

And again, this is something where we have the title, so let’s go ahead and make sure we’re removing the pieces that we don’t need. We don’t need to double up. And it’s already called sales by country, so it looks like we can even actually remove the y-Axis title as well. So we don’t need that.

We’ve got two of our pieces already in, let’s go ahead and bring our scatter plot in and grab that. And again, remember this is clear because we removed the background on it, so it will fit nicely on our white background already. And we certainly don’t need to have our giant label on it. So let’s go ahead and go to General.

We’ll remove the title, gives us a bunch of extra space back. And you can see again, Components, Clothing, Accessories are all linked visually between the two. So, and then, a matrix. We haven’t done a matrix yet, so let’s go ahead and build a matrix right now so we can drop it in. So I’m going to go ahead and click off of the image, and I’m going to go select the matrix tab.

I’m going to drop this down into our dashboard. Resize it so that it fits. And then it looks like we’ve got Category, we’ve got Sales, Product, and Profit all layered in here. So let’s start by making sure our Category is selected for rows. You can see we’ve got our Category and then our columns. We want to have Sales, Product Cost, and Profit.

So, let’s see, Sales Amount. Nope, sorry. Values. Product, Sales Amount, Product Cost, Total Product Cost, and our Profit Column. And you know, the titles of these can be a little unwieldy sometimes. I really do like to resize my titles by removing the Sum of. If you know what you’re looking at, I recommend doing this.

If you think your user might not, might think, am I looking at sums or averages? I would leave them in just so that it’s very clear what they’re looking at. So, and then we’ve resized a little bit by Profit column. But we want to make sure we can look at more than just category here. Let’s go ahead and bring in our date field.

So let’s go ahead and bring in, Year. You can see we have our dropdown now where we can look at a specific year if we’d like, and let’s look at Quarter next. So we want to have quarterly sales available. This makes a lot of sense, especially if you want to say, hey, I’d like to filter things down and only look at subsets of that information.

You can kind of see where everything goes, you can see what has has been sold within those times. So I want to focus on Clothing, I want to focus on Components. You can really see the filtering options, from that matrix themselves. And so, we do like to have a little bit of extra space available in the matrix.

Sometimes it’s nice you can resize these to make sure everything’s fitting, make sure we’re not too squished together. So, alright, now we’ve got our four main visualization types, let’s go ahead and build our KPI cards. So, I’m going to go ahead and click off-screen so I can bring in a card.

And let’s click on the Card option. So this will open a new card. And what I want to do is I want to bring in my three pieces of information that we’ve been looking at. We’ve been talking about Sales Amount, Product Cost, and Profit. So let’s start with our Sales Amount. Boom, put it right there. And we’re going to resize this down.

I want to say this is very much shrunk down. I think it starts at 45 by default, and I think we are at 20. So we are at 20 here. Category label is fine. Let’s maybe make it 10. And let’s go ahead and say our label is going to be, instead of Sum of Sales Amount, we’re just going to say, Sales Amount, so we don’t need it taking up any extra space.

And from our example dashboard, we put this one in the middle section of our prebuilt background, so you can see that it fits in nicely here. We can do the same exact thing with another card. We had total orders, so, I am going to go ahead and search Order Quantity, so you can see that’s a numeric field and I can put Order Quantity here, Sum of Order Quantity. 

Now I’m going to call this Total Orders. So we’ve got it. We’re going to shrink it down from callout value at 45 to 20. We are going to make sure our Category label is down to 10, and then we’re going to resize our card. And drop our KPI into our box. So we’re fitting it here. And then lastly, but not least, we have our total profit.

So a new card. Again, I love doing things in threes. The repetitive nature of it really drives home that here’s what we do to make sure this works every single time. So. I’m going to go ahead and search Profit in our data pane to return only our profit options. Let’s go ahead and throw this in the field and we’ll do our formatting again.

So, quick in the chat, who can tell me what size we should make our callout value? It’s 20 and we know that because we’ve been doing it and we do it over and over again until it’s right. So, alright, now we’ll shrink this down until it fits. Add it in and then make sure we’ve got everything in without hitting any of our border backgrounds.

Now it looks like we’re a little oversized here, and one of the best ways to do that would be then to, let’s take a look at our background, turn the background off. We know we’re white, on white. We can go ahead and make sure that any of the additional pieces of the background information come through.

I know it looks like it’s hard to see on my screen, but there are some thin lines separating these KPI boxes out. And so we’ve got all of our orders, we’ve got our Sales Amount and our Profit column in here, and let’s make sure we’re changing this to say Total Profit. So, okay. The last thing we need to do is add slicers. 

So we have two slicers on our example dashboard, Category and Country. So let’s go ahead and bring those in. So everybody remembers we have the Slicer pane, and we’re going to go ahead and bring in Category into our slicer. And there are some formatting that we really need to do here to make sure we can fit everything in.

If I tried to just drag this Category slicer down here, woo, it does not fit. We’re going to make it fit. And I know we can do it because I’ve done it in the example work. Let’s go ahead and take a look at what we need to do. Slicer header off. We know that is already done. And then let’s see here.

Values, let’s go ahead and shrink them down and then let’s remove that padding. So we’re going to slowly creep these together. So that we can fit everything in our Category box. And then you can see, boom, we have our Category slicers, and then we’re going to do the same thing for Country. We’re going to build, a new slicer box.

We’re going to search for Country. We’re going to drop those in here, and there’s too many, let’s make sure we filter them down to only the relevant countries that we had been looking at. So Australia, France, Germany, United Kingdom. And then let’s go ahead and make sure we do our header off and our values shrunk down to 10 and I think the padding was down to 2.

So let’s go ahead and shrink this up. We’ll drag this box down, maybe even 1. Oh my. So let’s go padding down to 1, and we’ll make sure it all fits.

Maybe even we have to go smaller. And then let’s make sure our background is off. So General, Effects, Background off. Then we fit everything on. So, and then to, if we’ve got one slicer set at, 1 pixel, we gotta go 0 pixels, we gotta make sure they’re both, so we’re going to be consistent across views.

And then we have a completed dashboard. So, if we wanted to do our filters, we certainly can. We want to look at certain countries, we certainly can. You see the information change in real time based on the slicers that we’ve selected. So this, came in one day from our individual bar chart, our line chart, our scatter plot, our scatter tooltip, and our KPI and Matrix.

And then we have a completed dashboard all in one day, ready to go. And you’re thinking to yourself, okay. I don’t use Figma. I’m not a designer. I’m not exactly sure what to do. There are some homebrew ways that we can do that in Power BI. And I have those pre-built for you in the follow-along workbook, so if you want to download that one, we have our dashboard view, which we’ve created, but then I also have Homebrew dashboard. 

And in Homebrew dashboard, I’ve done what I would say is an 80% recreation of the background images. So, this is shapes that I’ve brought in. And that’s done by going Home, or sorry, Insert Shapes. And I’ve just brought in a series of rectangles. I brought in a big gray rectangle.

And then I put four white rectangles on top of them, added shadows to them, and that’s the piece. So if I were, and I wonder if I can do this live, and let’s see if this works. I’m going to select all of my pieces and copy them. It doesn’t always work when you select multiple options, and I’m going to try and drop them on.

You can see that they’re roughly there. We haven’t done any of the titles. We haven’t had any of the additional information, but you get the idea that you can add your images to a background and get most of the way there that you would in a very professionalized Figma environment. Now, Conor did an awesome job.

These have some great rounded corners on them, trying to nest rounded corners, on top of each other in Power BI is not something I’m going to recommend at all. It’s very difficult. It’s why you can see in my homebrew version, we’ve gone with just regular rectangles, sharp edge, 90 degree corners. But by, you know, by bringing these in, you could turn the titles back on, you’d be able to fit a lot of the same information in without having to go outside of the Power BI environment.

It would mostly work, I would say. Now, custom images like the Playfair logo, our custom fonts, Gilroy is not a default font that’s included in Power BI. Those sorts of things you would need to use Figma for or another visualization software. You know, Adobe Creative Suite works really well.

But that’s one of the options we have. This has been Matt with Playfair+. Thanks for watching.