Pro tips for making Power BI reports user friendly

With thousands of features and innumerable possibilities, Power BI can become quite overwhelming while creating reports. With the right approach and user-friendly reports, you can exponentially increase your output with Power BI!

This post uncovers the pro tips that will transform your ordinary reports into insightful and user-friendly ones.

Highlight the appropriate sections

The reports you create will have a lot of data, including charts, numbers, and texts altogether. Usually, new users have a habit of having everything of the same size.

However, there will surely be some sections which are more important than the others.

Make sure to highlight the findings in terms of percentages or numbers so that they draw attention. Readers can then focus on the main areas and then validate the findings with other data and can make a decision easily.This is exactly how Power BI experts create dashboards!

Use full-screen mode to have everything together

You will also find Microsoft giving the same advice in this case.

Users tend to divide the report into many parts and analyze each of them separately. But having everything on one screen is what will boost your efficiency,

Use the full-screen mode and try and fit all the charts and information in one screen alone. If you cannot do that, it most probably means that you have a lot of information, so you should select the main ones and remove unnecessary data.

Being simple is what will get results

Among different BI Tools, Power BI is full of visualizations, and you surely will feel confused while choosing between them.

Don’t feel tempted to make your reports complex just for the sheer aesthetic looks they offer. You should ideally go with choosing the traditional bar graphs or line graphs.

Also, make sure to avoid pie-charts, making it confusing when the values of some data types are similar.

• Another pro tip is to use complementary colors, which will make the important data stand out.
• Make sure not to change the chart scales on axes and dimensions.
• Numbers should be presented nicely, and use decimals to make sure you do not use more than two numbers at a time
• The measure of data in charts should not vary by a large extent, which cannot be visualized properly.

Consider the needs of the audience

Every report should be created considering the end-user in mind. In the end, a report is useful and effective only if it helps the reader to make a decision.

These are some of the points you should consider –

• Size the reports according to the type of device your users will access the reports in
• Use terminology and information relevant to the expertise of the users
• Include only the relevant information for the users
• Highlight the findings and the areas which you want your users to read most importantly

Leveraging hierarchies to serve all team members in one go

While you may have data for years, there is a limit to what you can present on a chart in one dashboard. This is what you may be thinking, but it is not the case with Power BI.

Hierarchies in data can help you bifurcate the data and give viewers options to choose the data type they wish to see.

While you present the same report to your company, the CSO might want to check data of the complete year while at the same time, the operations manager would like to check last month’s sales to predict the upcoming load on the workforce.

Hierarchies will help you in this case as you can change the units and values and give control to the user with one click. Just clicking on the buttons will allow the user to switch from weekly to monthly to yearly data in the same chart window.

Filtering and relations

This is the best tip on the list because of the functions that it serves. Power BI allows you to filter the data and create relations among different sets of data, which will make your reports interactive.

There are different types of filters that you can create, including –

• The highlight filter in which clicking on one type of data highlights its presence in all other report areas. This is useful when you have many different variables, with each one playing its own role.
• Filers with relations allow you to create relations which will completely change all the charts on your dashboard after clicking on one of the values.

Summary

Try and incorporate all of these tips on your reports, and you will see a significant change in your efficiency and the results you get from Power BI.

The key point to keep in mind is simplicity. You will feel tempted to use hundreds of new and complex charts and variations but sticking to the goal and keeping things simple will get you the results!