5 Design Mistakes to Avoid in Power BI

What I don't get is why do you visualize profit margin % as a donut chart? Or avg. discount %? I mean, If these KPI would describe a process or goal that approches 100% and once it's there the goal is met, then it could make sense to me. But that's not how any business works: 100% profit margin or 100% discount. And this way of visualization also lacks any other way of displaying a reasonable target.

Loved your videos! Help me a lot ❤

Thanks for this, it's great to pay attention to detail while being a UX Power BI Developer

I totally agree, it seems little stuff but they are so important to bring balance on the reports. Very useful Bas.

Agree on all 5 mistakes identified. Here are some more:
Design mistake 1: I see this in 9/10 reports incl. this one. There is no clear indication of whether performance was good or bad. Take profit for example, is 13,7% profit margin good, bad or average? We have absolutely no idea.
Design mistake 2: how good or bad exactly? Swimmer asks coach , "how was my swimming"? coach replies "too slow"... "How many miliseconds exactly too slow?" that is the answer you want. PRECISION.
Design mistake 3: Irrelevant and repetitive visuals. If the chart don't answer any relevant question then don't include it. Every chart should answer at least one relevant question and you don't want charts that answer the same question (then remove one of them).
Design mistake 4: Lack of metric break-down, to diagnose performance you need break-down to understand WHY the performance of metric X happened. In this example, what contributed positively/negatively to the overall sales and why.

Great as usual, can you mention lollipop visual name please (Sales team VS Target)

Great video! But these examples are usually simple reports. I am a heavy data user. What's the most detailed (with many pages, bookmarks, tooltips, page navigations, multiple slicers, drill through pages, etc) power bi report you've worked on and how did you manage and design of the pages, filters, slicers, visuals, etc) for the most efficiency?

Thanks. Love your videos. Greetings from South Africa.

You are a great tutor of POWER BI reports, always delivering something important and unique. Many thanks.

Thanks Bas,
Do you have any video on how to create background images for report?

please answer, when we use buttom, should we always press CTR?

How do have bar chart and scatter chart on same tile.

I would have made the bars in the "Region" graphic in the lower left-hand location all the same color. Having different colored bars for the categories "West", "East", "Central", and "South" is not informative because and actually confuses the person looking at this report.
Also in the visual titled "Sales Teams vs. Target %", I would have created horizontal lollipop chart (If I were to use this kind of visual) instead of a vertical one since the data is categorical. If the data were time values like years or quarters I would create the vertical lollipop chart.

Great job. Would stand out even more, if you showed comparison at the end :) Just to amaze everyone even more :)

Thanks for this video!
I'm from LinkedIn by the way.
Another common mistake I see is the wrong use of shadows which causes inconsistency in depth perception.

Too much visual is a problem..its should be clean and straight to the point(goal of analysis).can be achieved by less visual

Such a great video Bas! You touched on it here, but do you have a tutorial on making reports accessible? I had a blind instructor at a company seminar tell us to always use text to explain what screen readers can't read. I've never forgot it, but sometimes find it hard to implement with design in mind.

What sort of visual did you use to create the "Sales Teams vs Target %" visual? (which reminds of volume sliders/equalizer bars)

Number 4 padding before and after, hmmm fortunately the OCD gene skipped my generation and for the life of me after many minutes of staring I could not decern any difference. I did think I maybe saw 31 faces and a vase.

#2 right on spot. Seeing that all that time as well and it's killing my eyes.

great stuff, thank you for sharing BAS

Great example of design pitfalls! My design policy is usually FSBC(Font, Size, Balance, Color) × STD(Snapshot, Trend, Detail) where the first part is similar to what you mentioned on the video and the second part is more like an EDA kind of thinking. The second part should contain at least 2 out of these 3 types of the charts such as Scatter chart or Card visual as “Snapshot”, Line or Ribbon chart as “Trend”, and Metrix/Table as “Detail”. By using the combination of these, one can easily get tons of insights by slicing and dicing.

Great video but the order of the field parameter slicer on the line chart was bugging me! Monthly, Weekly then Quarterly? Should be weekly, monthly, quarterly.

Things I see as mistakes in Power BI reports. Too much while space. Too busy background. Too many different kinds of visuals. Not enough pages. Not enough visual space given to visuals that need it. Not showing enough data to support the story you are trying to tell. In general too 'fancy' of a report. If you are making it 'fancy' you are trying to distract from what you are reporting.

This was great. Thank you

As always bas is best😘

Bas always on point!! My manager and I were just talking about having something like this into a PBI best practice guide for our larger team. Top notch content.

This is great stuff but I'd say it's more taking a report from intermediate level design to advanced. A lot of the teams I work with are much more basic unfortunately, e.g., 20+ categories on a pie chart, multiple tabs with identical charts/information but each tab is filtered by a different office/org (when a slicer could suffice) - I could go on haha. Would you ever consider making a video for basic learners too? Would be great to have a resource to share with them!

Hi bro!

After this video I have a suggestion for your content. Why can't you start a dashboard review series where u can get the dashboard from your subscribers and review it like once a week. From the we can learn a lot from our mistakes as well.

Thanks a lot for another supportive video. Keep it up.

Good tips! Thank you for sharing Bas!

No background, its is unnecessary clutter

Awesome.. I got 3 of them when I saw

Thanks Bas! You're always informative.

Extremely useful tutorial. Well explained 👏

You bring data to life, thanks bas

Hey bas,

As a powerbi Pro i often find that reports grow bigger and bigger over time. These pretty reports are great in principle, but its missing the tables basically every single one of my pages has. Do you have tips to expand your reports over time?