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jeroenterheerdt's avatar
jeroenterheerdt
Icon for Microsoft Employee rankMicrosoft Employee
2 years ago

Share your thoughts on visual calculations (preview)

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General Comment
kleigh's avatar
kleigh
Icon for Responsive Resident rankResponsive Resident
2 years ago

Visual calcs could be used to offer an extension to the "Show Value As" option.


Alongside "Percent of grand total", it could offer "Percent of..." and allow any other numeric field in the row to be chosen.

 

I'm currently preparing a visual which is a set of percentages vs a baseline value. Previously, this required a lot of measures. Now, it can use visual calcs instead. This works, but the menu option would cut the clicks required to complete the task.

  • jeroenterheerdt's avatar
    jeroenterheerdt
    Icon for Microsoft Employee rankMicrosoft Employee
    2 years ago

    hi kleigh thanks for the feedback! We are working on integrating visual calculations into this menu, but right now I am thinking about it as extending the options available with templates such as running sum / moving average. Since you open the "show value as" menu from a numerical value, the template would then be applied to that numerical value. If you open 'show value as' on a field named 'Sales' and chose 'running sum' we would add a visual calculation that is the running sum of Sales.

     

    However, you seem to imply a different viewpoint on this, which is very interesting to me. Can you elaborate about this part of your message please: "Alongside "Percent of grand total", it could offer "Percent of..." and allow any other numeric field in the row to be chosen.". An example would be very helpful. Thanks in advance for your consideration.

    • kleigh's avatar
      kleigh
      Icon for Responsive Resident rankResponsive Resident
      2 years ago

      I don't think this conflicts with the idea of applying templates. It's just a template that would be useful for the cases where I'm already applying visual calcs.

      We have columns that duplicates a boolean, except showing 1 for true and 0 for false. This would by itself show a count where a certain monitoring code has been set. For this visual, instead of a raw total, they are shown as a % of a baseline field. This is effectively the overall total with no filter applied, but since it's just another column it's not seen as being the total.

      The visual calc is for example:

      DAM 002% = DIVIDE([10 DAM 002: Procured], [Participation], 0)

       

      And our result:


      I've unhidden the count column here as an example, normally this visual hides them.

       

      There are a few other visuals I have where there are two measures, the counting measure, then the same thing which is a percent of another measure. My general preference is to replace measures that are simple calculations (like a division) and used for one visual with visual calcs.