🎵 On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...
Data driven emotions,
Conditional Drill-through Button,
and
Custom Visual Review: Comicgen
Scores
Data Clarity: 4/10
Versatility: 7/10
Fun Factor: 10/10
PBI Certified: No
Description
The Comicgen custom visual is a great way to bring emotion to your data. It uses cartoon drawings to display different emotions and poses based on data.
I must admit, I would never have sought out this visual in a business scenario, but maybe it has a place. Humans are more likely to remember emotive material than neutral material (Hamann, 2001). Emotive material is something we can connect with, usually through remembered experiences. Words such as laughter, joyful and success are more memorable than the neutral words of month, sales, and invest. So, if you want people to connect with your data and remember your report, add more emotion to it.
Sure, this leaves more open to interpretation, so you definitely want to back up this visual with some hard facts and figures, but maybe there's a reason emojis are so popular and perhaps there is a place for them in business reporting. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Overall, it's a fun visual and emotions are applicable to almost any dataset so it is fairly versatile (that is if we can learn to accept comics in our business reports).
Formatting Options
Like most Power BI visuals, Comicgen has the following formatting options:
- General
- Title
- Background
- Lock Aspect Ratio
- Border
- Shadow
- Visual Header
There is nothing special in any of these options, just the typical settings that all visuals have. However, Comicgen has one additional formatting option called 'Comic Settings' that makes the visual work.
Comic Settings
This is where all the magic happens. Comic settings lets you adjust the character, pose and emotion of your visual. It's possible to pick a static pose and emotion, or tell the visual to update based on your data.
Comic
At the time of writing this post, the Comicgen visual has 7 comic options available: Ava, Bean, Evan, Dee, Dey, Priya and Ringo. These must be preselected, and cannot update with a change in your data.
Pose
The Comicgen visual has many poses to choose from: Ponting Right (pointingright), Ponting Up (pointingup), Yuhoo (yuhoo), Super Perfect (superperfect), Holding Laptop (holdinglaptop), Angry Frustrated (angryfrustrated), Hands Folded (handsfolded), Hands on Hip (handsonhip), Holding Book (holdingbook), Reading Paper (readingpaper), Thumbs Up (thumbsup), Thinking hmm (thinkinghmm).
In addition to all those options above, there is an option for 'Data Driven' emotion. In order to use the 'Data Driven' option, you must have either a measure or column which returns exactly the value in (brackets) in the list above. Basically, you have to spell the poses exactly as they are written in the visual, but without the spaces. For some reason, they fixed the spelling mistake on 'pointing' for the data driven, but not in the format pane when you select it manually. ;-)
Emotion
The Comicgen visual currently has seven emotions: Normal, Laugh, Sad, Angry, Worried, Surprised, Wink.
Emotions can also be 'Data Driven'. So far, all emotions are single words so you don't need to worry about removing spaces. Make sure you write the data exactly as in the list, and your visual will work.
Mirror
This is such a simple option, but so important. You may have been distraught to discover that Dey can only point right and not left, well don't worry, just change the Mirror setting from 'Regular' to 'Mirror' and he'll point left.
Only Face
This is another handy option, and I used it to place my comic inside the donut hole of my donut chart. The default is 'False', which means you can see the body and poses of your comic, but you do have the option to set this to 'True'. Unfortunately, there's a lot of white empty space when this option is set to 'True', so the responsive sizing of this visual could use some improvement, but with some clever layering it can work.
Report Example
Alright, so how do we put this Comicgen visual to use in our SantaList.pbix file? Most datasets will not contain perfect pose and emotion words created for this visual, so we'll use the DAX SWITCH function that we looked at yesterday to convert our data into something this visual can understand. Recall we wrote a measure for pose and a measure for emotion:
Pose =
SWITCH (
SELECTEDVALUE ( 'Santa List'[Naughty or Nice?] ),
"Nice", "Yuhoo",
"Naughty", "AngryFrustrated",
"HandsFolded"
)
Emotion =
SWITCH (
SELECTEDVALUE ( 'Santa List'[Naughty or Nice?] ),
"Nice", "Laugh",
"Naughty", "worried",
"normal"
)
Today, we will use those two measures in our Comicgen visual.
How To:
- Open the SantaList.pbix file.
- In the Visualizations pane, click the three dots, then select Get more visuals.
- Search for 'Comic' and add the Comicgen visual to your report.
- Select the 'Check the List' page of your report. It's still looking pretty empty.
- Add the Comicgen visual to this page.
- Put the [Emotion] measure in the Emotion Data box.
- Put the [Pose] measure in the Pose Data box.
- Click the paint roller and expand the Comic Settings section.
- Select any Comic you like.
- Select 'Data Driven' for Pose.
- Select 'Data Driven' for Emotion.
- Save and test your file. It should show a different pose if you select a name on the naughty list.
It's starting to come together! Tune in again tomorrow for the next gift in the 12 Days of Christmas series where we'll look at another custom visual, the Enlighten Data Story, and see how this can help us compose Santa's letter.
