BLOGS BY TOPIC
BLOGS BY AUTHOR
BLOGS BY YEAR
The September 2017 Power BI Desktop update introduces ribbon charts, a feature to explain the increase or decrease for any chart point and a drill-through feature allowing you to temporarily switch to a summary page.
- What's New in Power BI Desktop - September 2017 Update
- Drill-through to a Summary Report Page
- Ribbon Charts (this blog)
- Automatically explaining the increase or decrease
- Showing Keyboard Short-Cuts
- Preview Features
For a cumulative list of all of the updates to Power BI Desktop in the last few months, see this blog. Our two-day Power BI Desktop course always uses the latest version of the software.
Posted by Andy Brown on 12 September 2017
You need a minimum screen resolution of about 700 pixels width to see our blogs. This is because they contain diagrams and tables which would not be viewable easily on a mobile phone or small laptop. Please use a larger tablet, notebook or desktop computer, or change your screen resolution settings.
Ribbon Charts
A new chart type!
The ribbon chart visualisation icon is every bit as tiny as all of the others.
A ribbon chart is just like a stacked column chart, except that the order of the items on each stack varies:
In 2012 the East Midlands region sold more than the North region, but in 2013 this was reversed.
You can change the following properties to customise a ribbon chart (in addition to all of the usual ones):
The Ribbons section allows you to change spacing, colouring, transparency and borders.
In this example, I've upped the spacing to 20 (the maximum):
A huge improvement, in my lowly opinion.
Turning off Match series color, by contrast, is a bad idea:
The chart was better without this change.
Here's my favourite combination of properties:
I've taken all transparency off (so that the ribbon intersections are one colour only), and turned the Border property on to put a thin border round each ribbon.
The default ribbon chart looks horrible, but once I started tweaking it, it grew on me.