Power BI offers plenty of familiar ways to visualize data, but sometimes a standard pie chart or bar graph isn’t the best way to tell the story behind your numbers. In this Fast Class, we’ll explore four less-common Power BI visuals—tree maps, ribbon charts, waterfall charts, and funnel charts—and look at practical ways to use them to uncover insights in your data. Along the way, you’ll see how these visuals can help organize detailed data, highlight changes and rankings, track processes, and analyze conversion rates.

Tree maps

The tree map works a lot like a pie chart, but as a rectangle instead of a circle. Add a category and a metric, and the visual displays categories at different sizes based on that metric. For example, you can take sales data and break it down by store location using either a pie chart or a tree map. The visuals communicate similar information, but the tree map uses the entire visual area to display the data.

An important advantage of the tree map becomes apparent when you add details and subcategories. If you break down each location by salesperson, the tree map makes it easy to distinguish between salespeople at each location at a glance. With a pie chart, you need to drill down to see the individual salespeople, and the results can become difficult to read. You can add another level as well. For example:

• Location
• Salesperson
• Product

With multiple levels of detail, the tree map makes it easier to pick out specific locations, salespeople, and products than a pie chart containing the same information.

Using a tree map as a slicer

Another useful feature of Power BI visuals is that they can act as slicers. Instead of navigating through several separate slicers to find information for a particular salesperson, you can select that person directly within the tree map. The other visuals on the report can then display information for that selection, such as sales volume, orders, and detailed sales data.

Ribbon charts

If you’ve used Power BI, you’ve probably worked with a bar graph. A ribbon chart offers a useful variation when you want to understand how rankings change over time. Imagine a stacked bar graph showing sales by location over several years. The default visual may order the columns based on the legend, such as alphabetically. That works if you only care about totals, but it doesn’t make it easy to identify which locations have the highest sales or how their rankings change.

A ribbon chart ranks the different locations based on their total sales and lets you see how those rankings change between periods. Ribbon charts are also customizable. You can even remove the ribbons and make the visual resemble a regular bar graph while retaining the ranking behavior that makes the ribbon chart useful.

Waterfall charts

A waterfall chart can be confusing at first, but once you understand how it works, it can be powerful. Unlike a regular bar graph, a waterfall chart rolls up data across categories and totals it. It is especially useful when you add a breakdown category and want to focus on changes between values. For example, consider the Minneapolis office:

• 2020 sales: $132,000
• 2021 sales: $139,000
• Change: $7,000 increase
• 2022 sales: $129,000
• Change from 2021: $10,000 decrease

The waterfall chart highlights these increases and decreases, making net change easier to identify. If you were only looking at overall totals, you might see sales hovering around the same general level each year. Breaking the data down in a waterfall chart lets you see which locations are growing and which are experiencing larger swings.

Showing the biggest movers

Another feature of the waterfall chart is the ability to limit a breakdown to the biggest movers. For example, the chart can show the top five salespeople based on year-over-year profit or loss. An “Other” category can represent the net change for the remaining salespeople, so you don’t need to display every individual person.

Power BI also lets you adjust how many breakdown categories appear, such as the top 5, top 10, or all salespeople. Because displaying too many categories makes the graph harder to read, it can be helpful to keep the breakdowns to as few as necessary.

Funnel charts

The funnel chart is well-suited for tracking a linear process, such as business-to-business sales or a service workflow, rather than cumulative sales data. For a sales process, you might track stages such as:

• Leads
• Qualified opportunities
• Quoted opportunities
• Invoiced opportunities
• Fulfilled orders

Reading the funnel from top to bottom provides a snapshot of where items currently sit in the process. This can help highlight areas such as a backlog of leads waiting to be qualified or opportunities waiting to be quoted.

Analyzing conversion rates

A funnel chart can also show overall conversion rates. In the example, a process begins with 400 leads:

• 236 have been qualified as opportunities
• 130 have been quoted
• 93 have been invoiced
• 50 have been fulfilled

That produces a 12.5% conversion rate from leads to fulfilled orders. This example assumes that each fulfilled lead progresses through every stage of the process. Your business process may work differently.

Using funnel chart data labels

Funnel charts offer formatting options that make conversion analysis even more useful. Data labels can display:

• The data value
• Percentage of the first value
• Percentage of the previous value

Using the first value as the comparison point shows how much of the original group reaches each stage. In the example, 59% of the 400 leads are qualified, 32% are quoted, 23% are invoiced, and 12.5% are ultimately fulfilled. Selecting percentage of the previous value gives you a different perspective. It shows the conversion from one stage to the next. In the example:

• 59% of leads are qualified
• 55% of qualified opportunities are quoted
• 71% of quoted opportunities are invoiced
• 53% of invoiced sales have been fulfilled

This information can help you examine whether a sales process needs changes to improve conversion at a particular stage or whether the process is working as intended.

Choosing the right Power BI visual

Each of these visuals provides a different way to explore your data:

• Tree maps are useful for displaying categories and subcategories efficiently and can also function as visual slicers.
• Ribbon charts help show rankings and how those rankings change over time.
• Waterfall charts emphasize increases, decreases, and net changes between categories or periods.
• Funnel charts help visualize stages in a linear process and analyze conversion rates.

Exploring these less-common Power BI visuals can reveal insights that may be difficult to spot using standard charts alone.