Yesterday we saw a beautiful example of panel charts with R. Today let me show you how to create the same (or even better) with Power BI & R.
What you need:
- Power BI Desktop and R
- Raw data set – rem-data.csv
Creating Panel Charts in Power BI with R
- Load CSV data in to Power BI
- Edit the query in so we can transform the data in to Pivot shape in Power Query
- Apply below steps in Power Query
- Group data by Group and Branch with aggregations on count (named Branch Count) and All rows (named Ratings)
- We get a totals by group and branch level.
- Expand Ratings table and show only Ratings column
- This creates a table with all group, branch and rating combinations along with branch total
- Group again, this time on Group, Branch, Branch total and Ratings with aggregation on count.
- Calculate count as percent of Branch count
- Format the percentage as percent
- Close and apply to Load this data in to Power BI
- Group data by Group and Branch with aggregations on count (named Branch Count) and All rows (named Ratings)
- Insert R script visualization
- Add Group, Branch, Ratings and Pct to values area. This creates a dataframe with all 4 columns.
- Add below R script and your visualization is ready.
library(tidyverse)
ggplot(data=dataset) +
geom_bar(aes(x=Rating, y=Pct), stat="identity")+
scale_x_discrete(limits = c("NME","AME","SP","OP","NR"))+
facet_wrap(~Branch, nrow=1)+
theme(strip.text.x = element_text(size = 8))
To run the R script, simply press play button in R script editor pane.
Enhancing your visualization – Adding a slicer on Group
This creates a truly powerful interactive panel chart in Power BI. Simply add Group as a slicer and play with it. Every time you select a new Group, Power BI runs the R script with filtered data fed to the dataframe. There is a second or two lag, but the wait is totally worth it. 🙂
Creating Interactive Panel charts in Power BI with R – Video tut
Here is a video outlining the entire process along with some tips on how to use R in Power BI. Check it out below or on Chandoo.org YouTube channel.
Download Power BI workbook
Click here to download Power BI workbook for this. You may need to adjust the data source settings. Play with the slicer to refresh the R panel charts.
Have you tried Power BI yet?
I am playing with Power BI for last year or so and I am in love. You are going to hear more about it on Chandoo.org for sure.
What about you? Have you played with Power BI yet? What are your thoughts?
Related: Introduction to Power Query.
8 Responses to “Top 5 keyboard shortcuts for Excel Charts”
As far as I remember (checked, again, 2 minutes ago) in my "Excel 2013" in order to select various chart elements I need to use the Arrow keys and not the TAB key.
Practically, the TAB key does nothing (within a Chart).
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Michael (Micky) Avidan
Thanks for pointing this out. This is how I remember it too, but when I was recording the video yesterday, only TAB key worked. MS must have changed the keys in Excel 2016. I have edited the post to include both keys.
The key navigation on charts is different in 2016.
TAB cycles through a layer of objects (SHIFT+TAB cycles backwards)
ENTER move down a layer
ESC moves up a layer
So on a column chart with title/legend/data labels if you select the plotarea the TAB will go through Title > Legend > Plotarea.
ENTER at plotarea will then select Vertical axis. Tab will take you through
Horizontal axis > gridlines > Series > Horizontal Axis.
ENTER with series selected will then allow you to TAB through individual data points and data labels.
If you ENTER on datalabels you can TAB through each data label.
ALT + F1 : to create default chart
ALT+E S T = CTRL + ALT + V, T : I find that easier to remember
I second what Michael already said about TAB and arrow keys. I can't help but think if this is related to the "," or ";" as separator. I prefer to use the chart tools - layout- drop down box, anyway.
Got to be F11 for instant charting. Highlight your data , hit F11 and voila! ?
Ctrl+1 is the most important chart shortcut. In fact, it works for any Excel object: whatever is selected, Ctrl+1 opens the task pane or dialog to format that object.
Somewhere along the line, maybe when Excel 2016 came out, the arrow keys stopped working to cycle through the elements of a chart. But what works is holding Ctrl while clicking the arrow keys. I haven't gotten used to the Tab and other keys, but as long as Ctrl+Arrow works, I'm good.
And F4 used to be so helpful when formatting a lot of charts. But since Excel 2007 came out, it has been mostly useless. It used to remember a whole set of changes at once, so I get that the newer modeless dialogs make that impractical. But now it only seems to work with formatting of lines and borders, and maybe fills. I find myself writing a lot of VBA one-liners in the Immediate Window to handle these tedious formatting tasks.
after clicking on a chart, is there a shortcut key to copy it?
Thank you for the Alt E S T - tip. This is more than a time saver. Because of dynamic charts or de-activated external references to data when you make the charts, you often have empty charts that are otherwise impossible to format. So this shortcut helps adressing that. I will work with it more and see if there remain some obstacles.