Chart visuals can broadly be categorized into the following four types of data relationships:
- Comparison: How items compare against each other or over time
- Relationship: How items relate (or correlate) to one another across multiple variables
- Distribution: The most common values for a variable and the concentration of values within a range
- Composition: The portion of a total that an item represents relative to other items, possibly over time
The following table associates specific visuals to these categories and briefly describes their top use cases:
Chart visuals by category
As a table of chart types, map visuals, and the three standard single number visuals provided in Power BI Desktop—Cards, Gauge, and KPI, are excluded. Single number visuals are commonly used in dashboards, mobile optimized reports, and in the top-left section of report pages to deliver easy access to important metrics.
The standard single number visuals (Card, Gauge, KPI) can also be used to create data alerts when these visuals are pinned to Power BI dashboards. Alerts can be created and managed in both the Power BI service and on the Power BI mobile applications. With an alert set on a dashboard tile representing one of these visuals, whenever the number of the visual crosses a defined condition (for example, above 100), a notification will be raised and optionally an email will be sent as well.
Details on standard map visuals are included in the Map visuals section of this chapter and the ArcGIS Map visual for Power BI is reviewed in Chapter 6, Applying Custom Visuals, Animation and Analytics.
There are several publicly available resources on visualization practices and visual selection. The Chart Suggestions diagram from Extreme Presentation (http://bit.ly/1xlXh1x) provides additional details on the visuals and visual categories described in this section. Additionally, the SQL BI team provides a Power BI Visuals Reference (http://bit.ly/2ndtcZj) that categorizes visuals at a more granular level than the table in this section.