Excel Power View (Table of Contents)
What is Excel Power View?
Power View is a Visualization tool present in Excel with the help of which you can create visually appealing graphs and charts, dashboards of your own for management as well as reports which can be sent daily, weekly, monthly. This tool is considered as a Reporting tool under Microsoft Excel 2013 and is available for all latest versions including Office 365. Whenever, we think of Microsoft Excel, we think of different tools such as Formulae which makes life easier for an analyst, PivotTables which can allow the user to analyse the data spread across large number of columns and rows, Analytical Tool-pack which almost covers all the important statistical predictions methods for forecasting, graph library which is as reach as any other programming language could provide, PowerPivot which allows you to take data from various other sources and actually work on it under excel. In this article, we are about to study the same tool namely Power View.
How to Enable Power View under Microsoft Excel?
In order to enable the Power View tool for interactive reports and dashboards, you first need to enable it under excel. Follow the steps below:
Step 1: Navigate to the File menu and select Options by clicking on it.
Step 2: A new window named Excel Options will pop-up with various options. Click on Add-ins option so that you can access all the add-in options available.
Step 3: Inside Add-ins, you can see an option called Manage: which has all the excel add-ins as a dropdown. Select COM Add-ins inside Manage: option and click on the Go button.
Step 4: Select Microsoft Power View for Excel option under the list of COM Add-ins and press OK option.
This will enable the Power View option in your Excel. You can access the same under the Insert tab. Please find the screenshot below:
Example – Power View Usage in Excel
Suppose we have sales data for different customers in different countries. We would like to have a dashboard based on this data under Power View. Follow the steps below:
Step 1: First of all, insert a table for this data in Excel. press CTRL+T to insert the table under given data and press on OK.
Your table should look like the one shown in screenshot below:
Step 2: Navigate towards Insert tab present on the excel ribbon and click on the Power View option placed at the end of the list.
Step 3: As soon as you click on the Power View option, it will load and generate a power view report within the same workbook. It may take some time to load the power view layout so have some patience. You will have a power view report as shown in the screenshot below:
This report layout has a table inside the main report template, filters besides that and finally Power View Field list same as that we see inside PivotTables at the rightmost corner. Here, we can slice and dice the report data by using filters or Power View Field list.
Step 4: Click on Table1 dropdown inside Power View Fields and select the Country and Margin Columns respectively. You can see the ∑ sign for Quantity, Sales and Margin columns. It is there because those are the columns that have numeric data present in them and can have a summation.
You can see a new layout will be created under the same Power View Report.
Step 5: Now, we will add a graph for this country-wise data. Navigate to the Design tab which appears at the top of the ribbon and you can see different design options under Power View Report sheet. Out of those, one is Switch Visualization. This option enables you to add graphs under the Power View Report.
Step 6: Click on Other Chart dropdown and select Pie option which allows you to insert pie chart for the country-wise data.
Your chart should look like the one shown below:
Step 7: Now select the Customer column, Sales and Margin as a data.
Step 8: Navigate to the Design tab again and this time, select Clustered Bar option under Bar Chart dropdown inside Switch Visualization menu.
This option will enable you to visualize the Sales and Margin for all customers in a single chart. See the screenshot below:
You have a scroll bar to scroll down until the last customer. Also, can sort the chart data by customer, Sales or Margin wise as well. This graph allows us to check what are the key customers for us in terms of sales as well as the margin amount.
Step 9: Follow the similar steps however, this time we will run the chart option for Customer and Quantity. Select those two columns under Power View Fields.
Step 10: Follow the same procedure as in step 8 to see the bar chart of customer-wise quantity sold. The graph should look like the one in the screenshot below:
This graph enables us to visualize which are the customers we have sold most of the item quantities to.
Step 11: Now, our report is complete. Please add the title to this report as “Sales Comparison with Different Parameters”.
Final Layout of our Power View Report would look like in the screenshot given below:
This is it from this article. Let’s wrap the things up with some points to be remembered:
Things to Remember About Power View in Excel
- It is mandatory to have the data cleaned before you insert Power View on the same. No blank spaces between cells, no blank cells, etc. should be checked well before.
- You also can export the Power View Dashboards and Reports into different formats such as PDF.
- Power View is disabled by Microsoft due to license purpose. Therefore, whenever, you are about to launch and use it for first time, you need to check for certain licensing parameters. The instructions are beyond the scope of this article.
- If you have downloaded the worksheet and not able to see the power view report created, the possible error is, you did not have Microsoft Silverlight preinstalled in your system.
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