🎵 On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...
Data storytelling,
Conditional Drill-through Button,
and
Custom Visual Review: Enlighten Data Story
Scores
Data Clarity: 7/10
Versatility: 8/10
Fun Factor: 3/10
PBI Certified: No
Description
The Enlighten Data Story custom visual allows you to add key facts and figures directly to a text narrative. It's so simple that it is truly effective and provides endless opportunities for data storytelling.
While you could achieve a similar effect with a custom DAX measure concatenation and a card visual, the Enlighten Data Story highlights the data figures to help them stand out from the rest of the narrative.
Formatting Options
The Enlighten Data Story has the typical formatting options for General, Title, Bacground, Lock aspect ration, Border, Shadow and Visual header. There is nothing extra or different in these categories.
The two additional formatting categories that make the Englighten Data Story stand out are the 'Story' and 'Data' categories.
Story
This allows you to format the static story element of your narrative. You can set the Font colour (yes it's a Kiwi-made visual so colour is spelled with a 'u' in it) and Font size.
In the Text section, type the narrative you wish to display. A # acts as a placeholder (though this can be changed in the Data formatting category) and will return the value of the data fields you have added to the Data values section of the Fields for this visual. For example, type:
Total sales are # for the period #.
Then add [Total Sales] measure and [Current Period] measure to the Data values of the visual. You must add them in the order you want them to appear in your narrative. If you have three fields but only two #, only the first two fields will display in your data story. If you have more # than fields, the extra # will show up in your data story.
Align allows you to left, center or right align the entire narrative. Scrolling enables is 'On' by default, in case your narrative gets too long to fit in the space you have allocated.
Pro tip: Try adding <br> to your story to add a line break (this one may be easy to copy and paste in as it tries to reformat the HTML code).
Total sales are <br> # <br> for the # period.
Data
This allows you to customize the Data values that you add to the narrative. The first thing you can do is edit the placeholder, handy if you need to display # as part of your data story. In this case, simply pick a symbol that you know you won't need in your data story.
You can set the Font colour and Font size for the data values, as well as set Bold to 'On' or toggle it off. This enables you to make your data figures stand out from the narrative in your data story, as they can take on a different size and colour to the rest of your text.
You can also change the native formatting of the fields. For example you may prefer to write 1,300,000 as 1.3M instead.
The 'Blank label' box is my favorite feature. We're still waiting for this feature in native Power BI visuals, but Enlighten have given us the option to replace a Blank() result with any value we desire in the Englighten Data Story. You might put 'NA' or 'Unknown' or 'Not available' or in some cases even '0' in this box to make your data story easier to read. You can see an example of this in the Enlighten Data Story Formatting image above.
'Show tooltips' is set to 'On' by default, but if you are using mostly measures, you may prefer to turn this off. The Enlighten Data Story doesn't have a separate 'tooltip' field area, so there's not much added information provided in a tooltip for a measure that you can't already see in the data story.
Report Example
We used the Enlighten Data Story visual to help compose Santa's letters letting each person know if they're on the naughty or nice list. Recall we created a measure using SWITCH to help display what Santa would say:
Letter =
SWITCH (
SELECTEDVALUE ( 'Santa List'[Naughty or Nice?] ),
"Nice", "Looks like you have been nice in 2020. Keep up the good work!",
"Naughty",
"Looks like you have been naughty in 2020. Best change your ways before Christmas.",
"Pick a name."
)
Now we can use that in our Enlighten Data Story.
How to:
- Open the SantaList.pbix file we've been working with.
- Select the 'Check the List' page - it should have the Comicgen visual there and not much else.
- Click the three dots in the Visualizations pane > Get more visuals and then search for and add the Enlighten Data Story.
- Add the Enlighten Data Story visual to an empty space on your report page.
- Add the SantaList[Name] column and [Letter] measure to the Data values for the visual.
- Click the paint roller to format the visual.
- Expand the Story section and type: Dear #, <br> # <br> Yours truly, <br> Santa
- Test your buttons, slicers and report functionality. It should be pretty functional by now.
- Add a background photo or splash of color to your pages if desired.
- Save the file.
Tune in again tomorrow for the final gift in the 12 Days of Christmas series where we'll refine the user experience of returning to the home page and look at how to use bookmarks to reset the report filters so that you don't have to clear the name from the last search before selecting a new name.
