This document provides a guide to creating and using KPI visuals in Power BI. It defines what a KPI is and gives examples of common KPIs like sales, marketing ROI, and customer satisfaction. It then provides a step-by-step guide to creating a KPI visual in Power BI, including adding a date dimension table, measures for current and previous year sales, and setting a target value. Finally, it discusses formatting options for KPI visuals and some limitations to keep in mind.

1. Power BI Tips
and Timesavers
Power BI KPIs
a guide to the KPI visual

2. Power BI KPIs can be a very powerful way to draw
attention to specific key performance indicators
Here is a step by step guide to get you started

3. What is a KPI?
a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is a way to measure performance against a target
Examples of KPIs
KPIs could include some of the following
Sales
Gross Sales could be measured against a Budget
Marketing
A Marketing return on investment could be tracked
Customer Satisfaction
Collecting customer feedback and using an ordinal measures such as a 1 to 5 scale to ensure happy customers

4. What is a KPI?
Using KPIs in Power BI
Power BI can be very helpful with its built in KPI visuals,
you can easily add the KPI visual to a dashboard to highlight very quickly areas that need to made prominent
Example
The KPI visual shows a comparison to a target
Sales last year are the target with a value of $42.29M
Sales this year are over 2% higher at $43.15M
It also shows the trend in the background to give more visual
context, good performance shown in green

5. How to create a KPI visual in Power BI
Step 1
Starting with a Power BI workbook in Power BI desktop, select
the KPI visual and drag it onto your canvas
You can see that there are three standard pieces of information
that we need in a KPI visual
Value is the data to be measured, in our example we use the
Sales in Dollars
Trend Axis is the time period to be measured across, we will
use the date
Target is optional, but we will come back to this

6. How to create a KPI visual in Power BI
Step 2
Add a date dimension table
This is important to give us the option to roll up the
data aggregation into useful buckets
We want to show the Year and Month as measured
periods
Set the relationship to the date table

7. How to create a KPI visual in Power BI
Step 2 continued
Add the Year and Month number to the trend axis
We can now see the visual begin to take shape
But you can see that is still lacks the context of a target

8. How to create a KPI visual in Power BI
Step 3
We will use the last year as a comparative
In the sales table, create a new measure using
SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR
Sales $ LY = CALCULATE(SUM(sales[sale_dollars]),
SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR('Calendar table'[Date]))
Add this to the Target field in the KPI Visual
The value is higher than the target, so it changes to a green
colour

9. Formatting options for Power BI KPIs
Callout value is used to set the font, size and positioning.
You can also change the display units as Thousands, Millions, Billions or even Trillions
Icons allows you turn them on or off, and resize
Trend Axis options for the trend chart in the background
Target Label settings for the sizing and type of target to show
Date allows you to show the date, again with the usual font, size and colour options

10. Limitations
Some Limitations of Power BI KPIs
Although the KPI cards can be very useful, it's worth trying to keep the focus on the relative performance of
the key indicators, too many visual elements can detract from the impact so choose items carefully
The axis of the trend line can be misleading at times as it defaults to a maximum and minimum value, this can
cause confusion as the low points in the trend tend to look like zero
Unlike other visuals there is no interactivity on the objects so no way to drill through, you would need to add
other visuals to the page to allow this

11. The main purposes of KPIs and the KPI visuals in Power BI are to draw
your attention to the relevant performance
Think of using them to highlight the most important points on a page but
keep things to a minimum

12. For more Tips, Tricks and
Timesavers, visit our website
Business Analytics Blog – Select Distinct
Credit: simon.harrison@selectdistinct.co.uk