HR Consultation Insights - Power BI Challenge #3 Entry from Greg

[EnterpriseDNA]

Here’s @Greg entry for Power BI Challenge 3. @Greg, would you like to share how you built this dashboard and what your inspiration is in building it?

[Greg]

Hi All:

INSPIRATION:
My inspiration was more from a back-end and presentation point-of-view than a “pick the best visuals” point-of-view. @BrianJ 's analysis was excellent and had I done something similar, I’m hopeful I could have extracted more insights, but, alas, I didn’t go very deep all with the data itself at all.

HOW:

1. Generated a very clean data model, using the main table as a staging query and multiple references to create all model tables (except dates);
2. Generated a consistent theme using a image background and partially-transparent rectangles for the header and footer bars:
   • I wanted a colour-shifting background, so used PowerPoint to take the gradient image I found and mirror it so colours go dark-light-dark (top-to–bottom)
3. Used eDNA Colour Theme Generator to extract colours from the image background I selected and created a JSON theme;
   • picked the darkest theme colour to use as the background colour for the grid rectangles and used drop shadows (drop shadows impacted spacing, and in the time available I didn’t find a solution I fully liked)
4. Included a Last Refresh table;
5. Included slicer selections in the footer and a slicer bar just above the footer:
   • made the date slicer take-up the minimum amount of space by hiding the slider;
   • made all slicers multi-select;
   • included a reset slicers button (to call the reset slicers bookmark
   • created concatenation measures using CONCATENATEX for all slicer selections, so that all selections are always visible (even if the report was screen-shotted, PDF’d, or printed);
   • included the last refresh date, report ID, report version, and report version date in the footer, again so always visible, again using CONTACTENATEX, as well as whitespace [UNICHAR(8204)] for the card body and my concatenated admin measure in the card title so I could right-align it;
6. Added an [Outcome Score] calculated column to the [Outcome] table to permit comparison of policies;
7. Used the Enlighten Data Story custom visual to preset a small number of the key measures at the top;

I didn’t have the time I wanted to go deep on the visuals to use, and I would have liked to generate more impactful visuals and insights.

Still, a thouroughly enjoyable challenge, and it did give me the opportunity to explore a few presentation ideas I’ve been kicking around for a while. Congratulations to all.

Greg

[sam.mckay]

Really well done on this report Greg.

One of the really great takeaways I have is the text that your placed up in the top section of your report. This isn’t something that I would generally do but I really love it here because it tells a really good story up front for the consumer, and I presume that you can actually make those key figures and text dynamic with measures.

So I could see this being used in many great situations where say a decision-maker actually wants to read the text of something to be able to make an evaluation and ultimately a decision. Then they might want to dynamically click through to a different consultation and receive the key facts and figures for that specific aspect of the data.

I also really like how you’ve placed the filters down the bottom here. This again is not something that I have generally done, I’ve always placed them at the top, but I think that you’ve gone for the text and important metrics first and foremost, and then let the user glanced down to the filters below to make their adjustments.

I really like it and it’s given me some ideas for future showcases that I might develop for other challenges or just generally.

Reviewing this in quite a bit of detail I can see there is a lot of small aspects to what you’ve done which are fantastic. I love how you have created a summary of the filters on the report page at the bottom, so the user really knows what they’re looking at. Also, the refresh time stamps are a great value add as well.

Super work.

Sam

[Greg]

Thanks for the kind words Sam … yes, the text at the top is dynamic and uses measures via the Enlighten Data Story custom visual. The inclusion of all slicer selections in the footer is a carry-over from a standard “Parameter Selections” table I always included in my SSRS reports so no matter how the report is viewed (on screen, screenshot, PDF, print) the filters are visible. Thanks, Greg

[AoakeP]

@sam.mckay just wanted to give some positive feedback on how fantastic the challenge series is, i haven;t submitted a report to the challenges but i am in aw of the submissions by the members they are fantastic and have given me inspiration.

@Greg the dynamic text visual you have used in your submission has solved a problem for me for a report i am working on, it is a Health and Safety report and the data is pulled from our CRM database, the Health and Safety manager would write a summary in a word document each month that i have been copying into excel and uploading into a table, i’m thinking this is a great solution to improve the reporting process, i can create standard text and using the visual input the metrics (measures), this will eliminate the need for the Manager to write a separate summary and one less table to maintain

[Greg]

Hi @AoakeP

Thanks for your kind words. I’m humbled you found the solution interesting.

Even easier, you can do this without a custom visual using CONCATENATE in a card as @BrianJ describes in this thread:

Including a DAX Measure in a text field

@llchoong, Here’s one way to do this using nested CONCATENATE functions (since you can only concatenate two text strings at a time): Example Label = VAR FirstString = CONCATENATE( "This measure is the concatenation of text plus the value of another measure, ", [Count Closed Claims] ) RETURN CONCATENATE( FirstString, ", with more text." ) [image] Interestingly, when I put this example together I found there was more formatting flexibility in using a table visual that card visu…

or perhaps COMBINEVALUES in a table cell, something like:

Long Dynamic Text with Measures = 
VAR _Separator = UNICHAR(10) & UNICHAR(10)
VAR _Sentence1 = "This is the first sentence that contains the value from the [Total Sales] measure as " & FORMAT( [Total Sales], "Currency" ) & "."
VAR _Sentence2 = "This is the second sentence that contains the value from the [Total Costs] measure as " & FORMAT( [Total Costs], "Currency" ) & "."
VAR _Sentence3 = "This is the third sentence that contains the value from the [Total Profits] measure as " & FORMAT( [Total Profits], "Currency" ) & "."

RETURN
COMBINEVALUES( _Separator, _Sentence1, _Sentence2, _Sentence3, _Sentence1, _Sentence2, _Sentence3, _Sentence1, _Sentence2, _Sentence3 )

(In these last 2, you lose the independent sizing but gain “story” length.)

Greg