In honor of Father's Day, I thought I'd tell a story of the history of the holiday and explore the Timeline Storyteller Custom Visual for Power BI.
Custom Visual Review: Timeline Storyteller
Scores
Data Clarity: 8/10
Versatility: 8/10
Fun Factor: 8/10
PBI Certified: No
Description
The Timeline Storyteller works on data where date dimension is key to the story. As long as you have a date to work with, the storyteller is quite versatile in how it allows you to display and manipulate your data.
How To
The Timeline Storyteller doesn't have many options in the Format menu - everything is built into the visual itself. This allows it to be versatile, but also means the report user has the ability to edit the story and configuration of the visual.
This makes it a bit confusing for someone new to the visual. In the report above - how do you interact with the visual? I have built a story in Playback Mode that matches the article I used as data source, however the buttons to toggle through the scenes are at the bottom of the visual. You may decide to explore and play with the data on your own before you get to my story! That's part of what makes it unique and versatile, but I'd like to see some development in this area of end user experience.
View Published Story
To view recorded scenes, click the arrow keys in the bottom left of the visual. When you get to the end of the story, Timeline Storyteller will automatically start the story from the beginning.
Select an item in the Legend to filter by that Category. You can also collapse the Legend if it is in your way.
Hover over the squares to see the Category description for that item.
You cannot record new scenes in view mode. Click the square icon to move into edit mode.
Edit Story
To create a story that others can flick through, you need to be in edit mode of the visual. Go ahead - you can test this out in the Power BI file above. Simply click the square icon in the Playback menu.
This will bring up three panes:
- Timeline representation | Scale | Layout: Top of visual
- Data | Annotate | Filter: Left of visual
- Record Scenes for Playback Mode: Bottom of visual
From a report developer perspective, it's very much like Power Point in that you can drag and drop the callouts to wherever you want. Unfortunately, it doesn't allow you to change the order of callouts - so you need to add them in the order you want.
Timeline representation | Scale | Layout
The example above uses data that spans decades, so I was limited in some of the display options I could choose, but this is most definitely a fun way to display timelines. If you aren't concerned with keeping the data chronological, but just need it to be in sequence, you have many options for how it's displayed, including a 'spiral' design where you can draw any shape you want!
Data | Annotate | Filter
You can use this pane to add notes and images to your story. Warning: If you click the 'Reset' icon it will clear all scenes (refresh your browser to get them back to what the report designer created).
Try adding an annotation and an image.
Record Scenes for Playback Mode
Remember to click 'Record' icon whenever you have a scene you like. It's always possible to delete a scene, but much harder to recreate it. It also wasn't possible to reorder scenes, so I had to be careful when developing my Playback Mode scenes to do them in the right order.
