Speaker 1: Hey everyone, it's Sam McKibe from EnterpriseDNA here. Today I just want to do a brief tutorial around how you can highlight key performance trends. What I want you to look at here is this top row, or this top level in this particular reporting dashboard. Now this was part of the recent EnterpriseDNA Learning Summit in 2018, and there were six full workshops in the Learning Summit, but this is just going to be a small breakout in terms of how you can incorporate this technique inside of your reports inside of Power BI, because I love it. I think it is such a good way to showcase performance trends over time of some really key business metrics or performance metrics that you might have in your business. It incorporates really two things, it incorporates a specific DAX calculation that shows trends really well, but then also a visualization technique, and it's very simple, it's not difficult at all. But by combining these two things I think that it actually showcases these trends and enables consumers to see high level information really effectively. Because sometimes if you just have numbers, and this is what it sort of comes down to, you're just showcasing numbers, it doesn't actually show the full picture. So seeing one number in isolation based on a time that you've selected in the report, which you can do in this dashboard here, so say I can actually change the time frame like this, seeing just numbers as maybe just say cards of numbers is not enough, you actually want to see what is happening to the actual trend, what is happening to the underlying trend and behind this particular number. And so that's what I want to show you, I want to show you how I did it in this particular model. Now the key to showcasing trends well in my view is utilizing moving averages. Now if you just showed results at a daily level, every single granular result, every single result, you're going to have charts which are just so incredibly busy, so incredibly busy they'll just be squiggly lines that are basically not showcasing a trend effectively. So what I did was I created moving averages for all of these particular key performance metrics, sales, margins, average order size, profits and costs, I created the same moving average for each individual one of those results so that I could see the trend over time versus just what the result was every single day. So what I, and you'll see here, so you'll see on the right hand side I created a measure group and I called it moving averages and you'll see here that all of these results, all of these particular measures correspond to the actual chart which is sitting within this top level of this particular dashboard. And so if I click on this one you'll see that this is actually the sales moving average and so let's have a look at the formula that I've utilized here. And this is why this technique is actually very, you can replicate this quite effectively in your own reports because you'll see that these calculations or these measures, the formula technique that I've used is exactly the same in each one of these measures and so it doesn't actually take that long to create a cool visualization like this. And so what I've done here is I'm basically looking at sales but what I want to do is I want to do it for a one month moving average. And what this does, so what this part of the average X formula does is it opens up a one month time window back from today or back from any day and then averages out all of the sales made in that one month time window. Okay, so that's essentially what it's doing and that's what a moving averages logically is right. But then have a look at say margins here, so we'll go and so I'll click on the margins visualization there and you'll see that this is exactly the same right, the same technique or same pattern but all I've done is I've input say a proper margin, a new measure from a prior calculation and this also incorporates this technique called measure branching which I go on and on and on about but this is really just branching out, this is a moving average branch of our core measures, okay. And then what I've done to really highlight, to really finish off this visualization is sometimes the line is also not enough right, so if you're just showing the chart and you weren't actually showing the number, well sometimes that doesn't add enough value. And so what I've done is I've also incorporated a card where I've included, so you see here that I've got my key measures, you can call these core measures, this is really your first layer of measures, this is really the trunk of the tree, this is where the core calculations, the simple calculations are going to be done. And you'll see here that this is a pretty generic sales calculation right, this is just my total sales, what I've done is I've put it inside a card and I've layered it on top of that visualization and I've done the same for margins, I've done the same for average order size, profits and costs etc. And so hopefully you can see that now that just adds a lot more color to key performance trends right and what I've done just to make it all work so seamlessly or look seamless is what I have placed the chart, what I've done is I've come up into format here and I've gone send backwards, I've gone send to back so that it doesn't actually sit in front of the card. So for example if I actually bring this, I'm going to bring it forward, bring to front, you'll see that that actually sits over the number and what you want to do is you actually want it to sit in behind the number so what I've done is I go send backwards until it actually goes behind and it hasn't gone back yet, no we don't want it to go totally to the back because I've got a few things in there, bring to front, so it takes a little bit of fiddling around because I've got quite a few visual elements inside of here and you see that that actually put it in behind now, that it just takes a bit of fiddling around there to get it so that it sits underneath the card visual. Okay so I think this is a truly great visualization technique in my view especially around these key performance business trends because as I say each one of these in isolation doesn't mean as much as the combined showing the trend and also showing the result and showing the number and this is just a cool way that you can visualize it and still enable, still have all of the natural filtering etc that might be going on inside your data, a consumer can come in and look at this and they can very quickly see okay well this particular 6 million well it actually, there's a huge spike sort of in the middle of this time frame that we've selected here and then it has dropped off and now we're trending up again, that's some pretty interesting insight that you can understand pretty quickly from looking at this. Okay I'm going to round things off there, thanks again for listening and hopefully you've enjoyed this one, if you did certainly throw the video a like, I always appreciate it and really helps in getting that feedback and for creating new content so also if you haven't subscribed to EnterpriseDNA TV certainly do, plenty of really good content coming out on Power BI very very soon and over the medium term so looking forward to getting that out to you as soon as I can. Okay all the very best, talk to you soon.