PowerBI.tips

Tag: Visual Groups

  • More Visuals Mo Problems

    More Visuals Mo Problems

    In some recent conversations the notion of minimizing the number of required visuals came up as a topic. While I know from talking with the Microsoft development team more visuals on a report page increases load time. But I haven’t been able to find any substantial numbers on how performance is impacted by increasing the visual count on a page. Spoiler alert, adding a ton of visuals to a page slows it down.

    Test Set up

    To begin our test I started with a know report the Microsoft September 2018 Layout. This was a good sample as it already had a number of visuals and buttons on the page. I then proceeded to create a single text box with some text in it. Then copy the text box over one hundred times. All the text boxes are placed into a single group. Grouping the text boxes allows for the ability to toggle on and off all of the visuals with a single click.

    Here is the before image of the report with the text boxes turned off:

    Now with all 100 text boxes turned on. Yes, not pretty I know, but it makes the point.

    Conducting the Test

    Now that the set up was complete we are able to use the performance analyzer to render all the visuals on the page.

    To open the performance analyzer with the new modern Power BI ribbon. Navigate to the View ribbon and click on the Performance analyzer button.

    With the Performance analyzer window open we Click the Start Recording button. This begins how the visuals perform when you interact with the report.

    There are two options at this point to start recording data.

    1. We can click on items on the report page
    2. Click the Refresh visuals button to refresh the entire page

    I chose option number two since I wanted a consistent method to record performance. This removes any human error by performing a sequence of clicks across the screen.

    After clicking the Refresh visuals the Performance analyzer generates a ton of data that we can sift through to understand performance of the report page. You can expand on one of the visual elements to understand how many milliseconds it takes for the visual to render by function.

    Note: For more details on each performance component read up on the Microsoft documentation found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/desktop-performance-analyzer

    We can now export the data from the recording by Clicking the Export button.

    For my test I ran 5 performance tests with the text boxes turned off and 5 tests with the text boxes turned off. The process was the following:

    1. Click Start Recording
    2. Click Refresh visuals
    3. Click Export to extract the data, name the file for future review
    4. Click Clear to remove all data
    5. Go back to step 2 to Refresh visuals
    6. Repeat process until 5 performance tests are complete
    7. Turn on the Text boxes and repeat the process for 5 performance tests

    The Test Results

    Finally we can dig into the data and figure how much impact we incurred from all the visuals. After a bit of playing around with the datasets in Power Query we are able to come up with the following results.

    At a high level adding the 100 extra text boxes increased the load time from 174 ms up to 3,100 ms which is a approximately a staggering 1700 % increase in load time.

    Here is the detailed break down for average load times compared with and without text boxes.

    There are some interesting notes here. When we added the text boxes it caused all other visuals to increase load time from 22 up to 28 % percent longer per object. Clearly the text boxes took the longest to render.

    If you’d like to test this on your own, you can download these materials from this GitHub location: https://github.com/MikeCarlo/PBIReportVisualPerformanceTest

    Implications & Observations

    After completing this test there were a couple of observations that I felt would be best practices when building future reports.

    1. It is important to take time to clearly label your visual elements on the report canvas. Doing so makes it easy to identify each item in the performance analyzer.
    2. Increasing the number of visuals on a page hurts rendering performance. So think carefully about how many visuals you need to add to convey the data story you are trying to tell.
    3. When a visual is not shown it does not impact performance rendering of the page.
    4. A trend I am seeing is individuals are creating really long pages. Meaning the page is 1280 x 3000 or even 4000 pixels long. This is a nice feature that lets the report consumer scroll through multiple visuals. However, this has an unintended consequence adding all the extra visuals is slowing the time for the report to render. Instead of increasing the page length it would be better to control which visuals are being shown by using Bookmarks and Grouping. To learn more about bookmarks & grouping visuals visit:
    5. Limit adding style elements such as drop shadows and visual shading images as these will increase load speeds. Instead push those types of changes down to a background image that can be placed on the page. This is the technique used in creating PowerBI.Tips layouts.

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  • Scale a Visual

    Scale a Visual

    For each visual in Power BI Desktop there is a button called Focus Mode. This feature highlights a single visual. While this can be helpful, it does remove the ability to change or adjust the visual based on filters or slicers. I’d like to introduce to you the concept of Scaling a visual.

    In this tutorial we walk through how to take a collection of visuals. Then group all the visuals. Finally, control the group of visuals by hiding or showing them with bookmarks.

    Check out this video tutorial on how to accomplish this within Power BI Desktop.

    Tutorial Video

    Downloads

    Download the icons and sample PBIX file at my GitHub repo.

    Download the layout used in this tutorial here.

    Other Resources

    Here are some other great tutorials around using the grouping feature in Power BI Desktop.

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  • Consolidate Report Pages Easily with Visual Grouping

    Consolidate Report Pages Easily with Visual Grouping

    We do a ton of Layouts here at powerbi.tips and with the introduction of the new visual grouping feature I was looking for different ways I could utilize that functionality to make templates for different reporting scenarios. First, if you aren’t familiar with how to build a visual group, be sure to check out a blog Mike wrote on this a little while ago on the subject.

    While I was exploring an idea of how I might leverage this new feature, a challenge I’d seen re-occurring in the Power BI Community forums popped to the forefront of my mind. This new feature gives a perfect solution for answering the question of Report page consolidation.

    Time and again I’ve seen people talk about navigation issues related to the number of pages or tabs they have in their reports. Sometimes, particularly in embedded scenario’s, you can’t reduce the pages and break them up into smaller reports. This could already be accomplished in the past, but man oh man, good luck finding what you were looking for in the selection pane. Let me show you how easy this is to accomplish with the addition of the new visual grouping feature. By walking through these few examples you can extend this to however many pages you need following the same patterns I describe below.

    Setup:

    On your main page, make some room for buttons that you can create to toggle your pages on/off.  You can see I did that in the image below.

    Next we’re going to click on the top object of the selection pane and hold SHIFT + Click the last object, this will highlight all the objects.

    Right click and select Group from the drop down menu.

    This will create a “Group 1”

    Let’s rename this to Page 1. You can do that by Double Clicking on the group name and typing in the new name, Page 1.

    Next, we’ll create a button called “Page 1”

    Select the Home ribbon, then click the icon called Buttons.

    Choose a Blank button from the drop down. In the formatting pane under the visualization area choose the section titled Button Text and toggle it on, then type in Page 1.

    Place the button in on the right side of the screen.

    Great, now since we just created this button, let’s create a second button. This one will be for our “Page 2”. Follow the same steps above or select the Page 1 button and do a CTRL + C (copy command) / CTRL +V (paste command) to create a new button. Rename it to Page 2 and you should end up with this

    Prep Additional Page

    Now, here is where this gets cool. Imagine you have N number of pages, all with roughly 10 objects on each page. We are going to go to each page and condense all the objects down to a single one. Go to your second page, in the same fashion that we created our page 1 group, we select all the objects in the selection pane.

    An alternative method would be to just click on your report canvas and CTRL + A to select all objects, then right click and create group. We now see our new group in the selection pane and we can double click to rename it Page 2.

    Bring It Together

    Now Click on the Page 2 group and hold CTRL +C to copy the group

    Navigate to page 1 and CTRL + V to paste the group.

    This will bring all the objects from your Page 2, to page 1 and it will look like a giant mess similar to this

    But you know what isn’t a mess? The Selection pane! Because we created the group, all we need to do is toggle the Page 2 visual icon to off

    And our page looks normal again. Now let’s hook up the buttons and bookmarks.

    Go to the View ribbon and open the Bookmarks pane.

    Click the Add button at the top of the window. This will create a snapshot of the current state of the report page. Double Click the bookmark that is created and change the name to Page 1.

    Now, toggle the Page 1 visual group off from the Selection Window. Then turn the visibility of Page 2 visual group to on.

    Create a second bookmark. Now, change the name to Page 2. You’ll likely notice that things just aren’t aligned right (at least in my case that is true because I’m using a background.

    But since the visual grouping is its own object, all I need to do is select it and all the visuals resize for me! I don’t have to individually mess around with each one! Super cool.

    The last thing we need to do is connect our buttons with our bookmarks. We Select the Page 1 button. Choose the Action in the formatting and toggle it On.

    Select the Bookmark from the Type drop down. Then Select the Page 1 bookmark we created.

    Repeat the same thing for Page 2. You have just created navigation buttons to the two views of your report pages.

    CTRL + Click in Power BI desktop will activate the actions on the buttons. Finally, you can see that you will toggle between the report pages on the single page. WHEW!

    Closing

    This was possible before visual grouping, but now it is an EXTREMELY clean and efficient way to consolidate your report pages and add a ton of objects into a single page. You do have a lot of objects on the page, but don’t worry there isn’t a performance impact because they don’t render until you click the button to make them appear. You can test this out by enabling the Performance Analyzer in the View ribbon.

    Visual grouping coupled with bookmark grouping have made these features fun to use and easily manageable for all. This is just a simple use case where extending the use of visual grouping to help us manage our reports better can make a world of difference as we build. I hope you enjoyed this post and that it helps you clean up any reports you may have that got a little unwieldy.

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