What is Bullet Chart in Power BI?
The following article provides an outline for Power BI Bullet Chart. Bullet Chart is a visualization chart type which gives excellent insight. Though slightly complex, the chart is an effective tool for measuring the performance of KPI. Power BI provides an elaborate mechanism to build bullet charts, and use them for decision making. These charts are useful, especially in situations where performance measurement of various categories is to be carried out.
How to Create Bullet Chart in Power BI?
In order to understand the concept of a bullet chart in Power BI, we are going to use the Product Sales dataset. The dataset contains data pertaining to six different products. There are five measures given for each product which are Actual, Target, Poor, Good and Excellent. Using these measures we are going to build bullet charts or each of the products. The bullet chart takes into consideration multiple measures. Let’s go through the demonstration as follows. To create a Bullet Chart, we will need data. So you can download the excel workbook from the below link which is used for this example.
In the following section, we will go through the detailed step-by-step process to create a Bullet Charts in Power BI.
Step 1: Load the dataset into Power BI. For that click on Get Data Menu under Home Tab. From the drop-down menu of Get Data, select appropriate data source type. In this case, it is Excel, so clicked on Excel as shown by the below screenshot.
Step 2: In the Navigator pane, select the appropriate sheet from the workbook (Sales in this case). The data from the sheet gets loaded as can be seen on the right-hand side of the pane. Finally, click on the Load button, highlighted in yellow, to load the data into Power BI.
Properly following the above procedure successfully loads the data into Power BI, and the required dimensions and measures can be seen in the Fields section on the right-hand side of the screenshot.
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Step 3: We have loaded the data as can be seen below.
Step 4: Bullet chart is not available as an in-built chart option in the Visualizations section, and it needs to be imported from the marketplace. Just click on “Import a custom visual” icon in the Visualizations section, and in the menu that pops-up, click on “Import from marketplace”.
Step 5: Now, sign in using appropriate credentials i.e. username and password.
Step 6: We can use Corporate or Student ID only to access this feature. Successful login takes us to Power BI Visuals Marketplace as shown by the following screenshot. Click on Marketplace, and the available visuals appear. We must select the required visuals from these options. Search the required one in the search box located on the left-hand side.
Step 7: When we search ‘bullet’ in Marketplace, various options for the visualization appear from which we can select the required one. Read the description for the option to be selected prior to proceeding ahead. We selected the first Bullet Chart option. Click on the Add button on the right-hand side of the chart tool, in order to add the chart into Power BI.
Step 8: When the chart gets successfully imported into Power BI, we get a success message as shown by the screenshot below. Click on Ok to proceed ahead.
Step 9: The following screenshot shows the newly imported bullet chart visualization being highlighted. Click on the bullet chart symbol in the Visualizations section.
Step 10: We get a bullet chart layout as can be seen on the left-hand side of the following screenshot. We will bring requisite fields into this layout in order to obtain the required bullet chart.
Step 11: Now, select the fields one-by-one. Select Product, Actual, Target, Poor, Good, and Excellent in this order. The order is very important in order to generate the right bullet chart.
Step 12: When we follow the above step properly, the bullet charts get generated as can be seen in the following screenshot. Here the black colored bar inside represents the Actual measure, the slim vertical line represents Target, Gray, Sky Blue, and Red colors represent the Poor, Good, and Excellent measures respectively.
Step 13: We successfully managed to generate a bullet chart visualization. However, we want Poor, Good, and Excellent criteria to be represented by Gray, Sky Blue, and Red colors respectively. To format the chart, click on the “Format” symbol.
Step 14: First, we will change the orientation of the chart. For that in the “Orientation” section in the Format section, click on the requisite option. From the available options, we selected the “Vertical Bottom” option.
Step 15: When we select the “Vertical Bottom” option by following the above procedure, we get the vertical bullet chart. Observe that the product names appear below the bullet chart.
Step 16: Now, we can set the required colors in the Colors section. Here, “Minimum” represents Poor, “Needs Improvement” represents Good, and Satisfactory is represented by “Excellent”.
Step 17: Now, we have set Minimum to Purple, Needs Improvement to Green, and Satisfactory to Yellow.
Step 18: Now, as can be seen in the following screenshot, we have got a bullet chart where the red color represents poor performance category, yellow represents good performance, while the green color represents Excellent. We can see in the below screenshot, the products BMN, SCH, and BMK couldn’t achieve the target, while the rest three well exceeded the target.
Things to Remember
- The bullet chart visualization is not available directly as an in-built visualization chart type. It needs to be imported into Power BI from the marketplace.
- To generate a bullet chart, the measures must be selected in an appropriate order or else incorrect visualization would be generated.
- Various bullet chart options available in the marketplace should have experimented in order to know the unique features provided by each of them.
Recommended Articles
This is a guide to Power BI Bullet Chart. Here we discuss how to create bullet chart in Power BI along with examples and downloadable Power BI template. You may also look at the following articles to learn more –
