Power BI in Practice Blog Posts

The Line Plot Segment. When most of us think of a chart or graph, we're usually thinking in terms of a "cartesian" chart where data is plotted on both the X and Y axis. We created cartesian charts when we used the 2D plot segment that we explored in my earlier posts; #5 and #6. However, with Charticulator, you always need to think "outside the box", to think laterally because there is another approach to plotting data and that is… Read More

Polar Scaffolds. Pies, Peacocks & Nightingales. In my last post, I took you through using Horizontal and Vertical Line Scaffolds. It was there that I think we concluded we'd probably rather use sub-layouts, not Scaffolds to lay out our charts horizontally or vertically, mainly because sub-layouts give us a lot more design choices. However, there is another type of Scaffold for which hopefully you will find a plethora of uses. If you want to design circular chart types such as… Read More

Horizontal Line & Vertical Line Scaffolds Before we delve into the rather obscure world of Scaffolds, let's remind ourselves of what we know so far about how Charticulator lays out a chart. If you've read my blog post "Charticulator Explained #5" on Plot Segment Layouts you will know that there are two key drivers in the layout of the chart; fields bound to the axes and sub-layouts. So for instance, we will get different layouts if we bind the Year… Read More

Guides, Guide Coordinators & Anchoring. Have you been wondering why elements of your Charticulator chart won't stay where you put them? If the answer to this is "yes" then you need to read this post. You see, what you probably haven't understood is that for anything placed on the canvas or in the glyph pane to stop wandering around, they must be anchored to a guide. This can be one of the default guides or it can be a guide… Read More

Scales & Legends. The problem with attempting to explain how Charticulator works is that there's a frustrating "chicken and egg" scenario. To understand topic "A", you need to know about topic "B" but to understand topic "B", you need to know about topic "A". So in other words, you need to already have some knowledge of each topic before we can attempt to explain more. This is why in this post, we're going to re-visit ground some of which we've… Read More

Charticulator Expressions. In this post we take a break from designing charts and instead take a detailed look at the expressions used by Charticulator when you bind data to an attribute. I'm talking about this type of thing:- I'm also going to attempt to explain Charticulator's rather unusual numeric formatting method where you edit characters inside those curly brackets. It's a syntax known as "d3-format". Have you ever heard of it? No? Well, neither had I nor indeed have any… Read More

Numeric Axes, Tick Marks & Tick Data. If you've read my previous blog post you'll know that with Charticulator you can use two categorical axes and hopefully this has inspired you to build more adventurous visuals. To entice you to carry on reading my series of posts, I keep holding out a "carrot", insisting that you can do a whole load of things in Charticulator that you can't do in Power BI visuals. The "stick" is that to be able… Read More

Using Two Categorical Axes. In my very first post on Charticulator, I urged you to forget everything you currently know about creating conventional charts. Instead to think in terms of designing a representation of your data, where you're no longer restrained by the number of axes, categories and values you want to represent. Yet so far in this series of blog posts, we've been very unambitious in our chart designs. All the charts we've created have been variations on standard… Read More