Comicgen Visual in Power BI

[Pragati11]

Power BI gives us a flexibility of using custom visuals in variety of scenarios to take our reports to the next level. Today in this blog I will be talking about Comicgen custom visual in a particular scenario to show how this visual can add a bit of emotion and pose visually to your report. 

Consider a scenario, where I have got Quarterly Sales by different clothing category and have visualised it as follows:

I can use the slicer on top of the chart to slice-and-dice data by year. Now let us look at how we can use comicgen visual here. First thing what I will do is create a measure that will use total sales to display a message whether it met the sales target or not. The simple measure that I have created is as follows:

SalesCommentary = IF(CALCULATE(SUM([Sales])) > 11000, "Sales met the Target!", "Sales did-not meet the Target!")

The measure has an easy logic of IF-ELSE loop, if the total sales are greater than 11,000 then a message is displayed that the sales met the target otherwise sales din not meet the target. Let us move this measure in a card visual and see how this is affected by slicer change:

So, we can see how the measure changes with the selection in the slicer and based on the total sales. Now let us add a comicgen custom visual to our report page. The details on comicgen visual can be found here.  

You will need to add this as a custom visual in Power BI and once you add it on the report page then you see similar to the shown below:

 The comicgen visual requires 2 inputs:

•  Emotional Data - This can be a column in your dataset or a calculated measure
• Pose Data - This can be a column in your dataset or a calculated measure

In this case, we will create 2 simple measures for the above.

• Emotional Data -  SalesEmotion = IF(CALCULATE(SUM([Sales])) > 11000, "normal", "worried")
• Pose Data -  SalesPose = IF(CALCULATE(SUM([Sales])) > 11000, "yuhoo", "handsfolded")

Once we have the above 2 measures created, we move these to the comicgen visual and get as follows:

The visual shows a default comicgen, but we can modify this by multiple different formatting options. I have highlighted the settings that I have used in the image below: 

The main settings for this visual are listed as:

• Comic - Dee (This is the comic character I have chosen. There are other options available as well)
• Pose - We want this Data Driven based on the measure we created above
• Emotion - We want this Data Driven based on the measure we created above

  Once I have this set up along with few other formatting settings, I get the following comicgen visual working in the way shown below:

  

  Just see how cool it is to see the emotions and poses with the changing sales on the report page. We can even see the sales commentary whether the sales target were met or not. Let me know your views and scenarios on this custom visual. Don't forget to share if you have used this visual in different scenarios on your report.

  Hopefully this blog helps you in understanding one of the scenario in which we can use this comicgen visual on our reports.

  Don't forget to leave a feedback!

  - Pragati