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Power View is an add-in included within Excel 2013 and later versions. This tutorial shows how to create Power View reports based on Analysis Services tabular models.
- Overview - what is Power View?
- Creating your first Power View report
- Creating and formatting basic visualisations (tables)
- Text boxes and images in Power View
- Filtering reports using tiles, slicers and filters
- Matrices and cards in Power View (this blog)
- Charts in Power View
This blog is part of our online SSAS Tabular tutorial; we also offer lots of other Analysis Services training resources.
Posted by Andy Brown on 08 December 2015
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Matrices and cards in Power View
What are matrices and cards?
A matrix is basically a grouped report. It allows you to turn a table:
This table is grouping by quadrant, species and centre type.
Into a grouped report:
You can also drill-down, as this blog will shortly demonstrate.
Cards, by contrast, are almost completely pointless:
One of the two styles of card.
Users of Reporting Services (SSRS) should know that a matrix in SSRS is completely different to a matrix in Power View!
Creating a matrix
To create a matrix, start with a table which is grouping by at least two columns:
This table is showing total sales by quadrant, species and centre type.
From the DESIGN tab of the ribbon, choose to turn this into a matrix:
Choose this option to turn a table into a matrix.
Initially matrices just allow you to see group totals:
You can see group totals in a matrix.
Drill-down using matrices
The great thing about matrices is that they support drill-down. To enable this, choose this menu option:
Choose this option to enable drill-down.
The view of your matrix changes completely:
You just see totals by the first grouping column.
However, you can now click on any quadrant (for example) to show its details:
Click on a label in the first column, and a drill-down icon will appear.
You can continue in this vein to drill-down to show total sales for amphibians for the East quadrant:
You can drill back up, or drill down still further.
As always, you can press CTRL + Z to return to where you were really easily.
Creating cards
You can turn a table into cards, although whether you'd want to is another question. First select your table:
Create and select a table.
Now choose to make this into a card:
Choose this menu on the DESIGN tab of the Excel ribbon to turn your table into a card.
This is what you'll now see:
Cards show each row in a separate card.
Finally, you can change the card style to call-outs:
Choose this option to change the card style.
However, I just don't see the point of this:
You can use the scroll arrow at the bottom right to scroll down, but this seems a strange way to want to view data.
For the final part of this blog, I'll show how to create charts (which will include a fantastic feature allowing you to show how bubble charts change over time).