THE BURNINGSUIT BLOG

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

2D Region Plot Segments Part 2 – Sorting, Spacing, Aligning etc. In my last blog post, we delved into the mind-bending world of plot segment sub-layouts. Also at long last, we learned how to build a simple bar chart in Charticulator. However, are you still asking yourself; so what? What is the benefit of using Charticulator over using the default visuals installed with Power BI? After all, most of the charts we've created so far; column, bar and line charts… Read More

2D Region Plot Segments Part 1 - Sub-Layouts. In my last post I showed you how to create a line chart using a symbol as your glyph. You also learned something more important; that if you bind a numeric field to the Y-Axis you will create a "numeric" axis, a value axis in the true sense. Glyphs will then be plotted against this axis according to their value despite the shape of the glyph. However, you may be a little… Read More

Using Symbols & Y-Axis Weirdness. If you've been following along with my earlier posts on Charticulator, it may not have escaped your notice that I've always used either a Mark or a Line in the Glyph pane. Also, I've only ever created Column type charts in my examples. In this post, however, things are about to change because we're going to turn our attention to creating "Point" style charts, such as Line Charts and Scatter Plots, which use a Symbol… Read More

Binding Data. In my last post, we took a tour around the Charticulator screen and learned about the Attributes pane which lists the attributes of the currently selected Layer. For example, to show the attributes of the rectangle mark of the glyph, select "Shape1" in the Layers pane and the Attributes pane will show the attributes for "Shape1". In Charticulator, you can associate a field with an attribute by "binding data" to it and this will drive the behaviour and/or… Read More

Taking a Tour Around the Screen Since my last blog post, I've been looking more closely at some of the resources "out there" if you want to learn about Charticulator, particularly the YouTube videos. I hope at this point you're not interested in seeing people showcase their amazing talents at using Charticulator; "Hey presto!" and it's done! "Here's an amazing chart I've created in Charticulator and here's the complex DAX I've used to do it! Oh, and I'll just use… Read More

Creating a Simple Charticulator Chart Recently a new custom visual has come into the Power BI world. Charticulator (http://charticulator.com) is a visualisation that lets you build other visualisations. It's not easy, but the results are beautiful and if you need a particular data visualization you can't get anywhere else, it's fantastic. Note: At the time of writing, Charticulator is still in preview.  This means that some aspects of the interface may change and you may find that screenshots shown in… Read More